00:00:00:10 – 00:00:17:14
Unknown
All right. Well, might move on then to kind of, I guess, some strategies for late 2021 and 2022. And I think that look, the other thing, obviously businesses are going to start looking at a mindset change from thinking about tomorrow to maybe planning six months now.

00:00:17:14 – 00:00:32:13
Unknown
And obviously Covid disaster payments have all ended. So a lot of staff, while the Covid disaster payments were being paid, a lot of staff were happy to do reduced hours and things like that. So now that money’s gone, those people, we’re already seeing this with clients.

00:00:32:13 – 00:00:53:04
Unknown
They’re already saying, Well, I’m not continuing on my reduced hours at this point, and the employer frankly has no right to really continue those arrangements if those arrangements were sort of mutual agreement on a temporary basis. The JobSaver program, as you all know, ends 30th of November, and there’s obviously some some challenges around that because you

00:00:53:04 – 00:01:11:01
Unknown
can’t make you got to maintain your headcount and those sort of things. So we’ve got clients literally ready to pull the trigger on redundancies. December the first. But basically, most businesses will fit into one of three categories in the next few months it will either be the expansion, contraction and or consolidation.

00:01:11:10 – 00:01:27:18
Unknown
And we’ll kind of go into some of the things that each business in those categories should think about in that in that time ahead. I’ll I’ll move on then to, I guess, consolidation. And, you know, for the businesses that are not looking at a lot of big change right now, these are some of the things that maybe you

00:01:27:18 – 00:01:37:14
Unknown
should think about and and look at. These are these are probably things that everyone should be thinking about, probably more so if you’ve got more time to think about these things, these are things that you should certainly consider.

00:01:37:14 – 00:01:54:21
Unknown
So the Fair Work Amendment Bill in 2021 basically made a change to look at this issue of sexual harassment. So what it actually said is that sexual harassment can now be a valid reason for dismissal, even if it’s a one off incident.

00:01:56:00 – 00:02:12:17
Unknown
The other thing that the Fair Work Commission can now do if an individual applies is they can make an application to the Fair Work Commission to deal with a sexual harassment matter or make orders about sexual harassment matter to stop a certain thing happening in the workplace.

00:02:12:18 – 00:02:30:15
Unknown
So what what sometimes what you may have heard of before is the anti-bullying orders that the Fair Work Commission can make. And let’s say, for example, I am being bullied at work by another person. As long as I’m still employed, I can make an application to the Fair Work Commission to try and get them to stop the bullying at

00:02:30:15 – 00:02:42:09
Unknown
work, and the Fair Work Commission can make a range of orders. If I’ve already left the employment, then that’s not available to me. But the Fair Work Commission can make orders for people who are still employed either on now.

00:02:42:18 – 00:03:01:14
Unknown
Workplace bullying or sexual harassment. And that could mean to give you an example of orders they could make could mean moving someone to another location in the workplace or moving someone to another department. They can make orders that are that significant to impact upon these things, but probably the one take out from this in particular.

00:03:01:14 – 00:03:20:07
Unknown
Don’t worry so much about those orders because they are quite rare. The one thing that is very important now in this space is having workplace policies. And and I would say, providing training in this space because what the new amendment bill requires is that you must take positive.

00:03:20:07 – 00:03:35:10
Unknown
You must. I think what is positive obligation to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace and a policy is one thing and that goes part of the way there. But providing some sort of training is also quite important. And just very quickly, I’ll talk about a client

00:03:35:10 – 00:03:52:19
Unknown
issue that we had recently was a non for profit organization. They had an employee, a female employee actually who groped a male employee in the workplace on it occurred on a number of occasions. But there was a particular incident in early June that occurred.

00:03:52:19 – 00:04:11:21
Unknown
And it was really interesting because we we came on board with this client just a few days before this happened. So it was this pot luck that this issue came up. We assisted the client with the process, so what happened was that the individual made a number of crude comments, was groping this employee, grabbing and grabbing him

00:04:11:21 – 00:04:25:23
Unknown
on the backside. And basically, as a result of this, she was suspended. She attended a meeting about about her ongoing employment. She admitted all of the conduct. She admitted all of it. There was not, not even a context on it now.

00:04:25:23 – 00:04:45:03
Unknown
The employer said it was considering termination. The employee actually resigned, but then still run an unfair dismissal against the business, saying, Well, it was clear I was going to be terminated, but the client didn’t provide me with any instruction or training regarding sexual harassment.

00:04:45:03 – 00:04:57:22
Unknown
Literally the argument she was making. This might sound stupid to most of the people in the group, but she was just making the argument that, well, I didn’t know that what I was doing was sexual harassment, and

00:04:57:22 – 00:05:08:24
Unknown
I know that’s crazy, but that’s the. Argument she was running in this this matter went all the way to a hearing, we actually had a hearing on the 29th of last month, and it literally settled on the day of the hearing.

00:05:09:00 – 00:05:27:20
Unknown
So the organization decided in the end that it didn’t want to involve various others in giving evidence in the matter. It did make a payment to her, can’t disclose what that was, but it really highlighted to me that well weakness in that particular case was that they hadn’t done the training and we’d only been engaged

00:05:27:20 – 00:05:39:20
Unknown
for three days. So we hadn’t been able to even encourage the client to implement the training. We recommend to clients that we’ve created for clients to do to deal with that because it was so quick it happened three days after the engagement

00:05:39:20 – 00:06:03:21
Unknown
So that’s a really interesting point. The other the other one that you may be familiar with is casual employment changes. So now the large employers with more than 15 employees, if you have a casual that’s been employed for more than twelve months, you must make an offer for that person to convert to permanent employment.

00:06:04:03 – 00:06:16:12
Unknown
It doesn’t mean they have to, and it doesn’t mean and it certainly doesn’t mean that they have to convert at the same rate.. And that’s the main reason why most casuals wont convert because they realize they’re going from casual rates to permanent rates.

00:06:16:22 – 00:06:34:12
Unknown
But the obligation is to make an offer now what constitutes an offer? We’ve come up with some sort of letter style templates where basically the employer says, Look, you’ve reached twelve months casual employment. This is our offer to convert if you want to convert.

00:06:34:14 – 00:06:56:17
Unknown
Please discuss it with us. But if you do convert, be aware of these things because permanent employment has different obviously conditions to casual employment. So that’s important. The small employers of less than 15 employees, you don’t have to offer or make a formal offer to those long serving casuals, but they can request conversion.

00:06:56:17 – 00:07:13:22
Unknown
So there’s a kind of an additional compliance obligation if you like on larger employers when compared to smaller ones. But all of them it’s the same notion that if the employee has twelve months service or more of casual employment, they can request or they can basically seek conversion.

00:07:14:10 – 00:07:28:11
Unknown
Now, whether you accept you can reject that conversion, but you’ve got to have very good business grounds for not doing it. The way that the Fair Work Commission looks at this and the way that this change has been enacted is that, well, if you’ve had a casual has been working on a regular basis for over twelve months

00:07:28:20 – 00:07:44:01
Unknown
, well, then you know, there’s clearly ongoing work. So why can’t that person be converted to at least part time employment or full time employment? So there’s certainly another that’s another key thing that’s come up in the last come up in 2021.

00:07:44:16 – 00:08:03:00
Unknown
Question on that? No. And look, the only two other things I would mention in consolidation is, look, a lot of you would probably be familiar with the annualized salary requirements that were outlined in the modern award last year.

00:08:03:12 – 00:08:21:08
Unknown
Again, that’s something that applies to I think it’s 22 out of 130 modern awards. So that’s something that we’re seeing a number of questions from clients about. So that’s something that if you’ve got employees on annual salaries and they are covered by one of those awards, then yeah, good to seek some advice on that because that’s

00:08:21:08 – 00:08:40:00
Unknown
an important one. Some awards now require some mandatory classification. So what that means is that if if you have an employee who’s employed under some some of the awards, what those awards now require is that you nominate what classification level that person is upon their commencement of employment.

00:08:40:00 – 00:08:57:11
Unknown
And to give you an example of this, I think the the Clerks award is one of them. I think the manufacturing award also has some requirements for mandatory classifications as well in that. So again, I don’t have a list of all the awards with me today, but that’s another relatively small point.

00:08:57:11 – 00:09:20:08
Unknown
But again, something that came up in 2020 that we found in particular on on that front. So another key issue to look at. I’ve only got three sildes I think it’s three slides left. So I’m. This is a little bit about worker’s comp, and it just goes into sort of the range of different.

00:09:21:06 – 00:09:32:18
Unknown
This data is a little bit dated in that we’ve only got the 2017-2018, but it does give a good indication as to the trends. And the one I have highlighted in particular is the mental health conditions.

00:09:32:18 – 00:09:53:16
Unknown
That seems to be something that significantly on the rise and probably the data will be even more than this, I would say, in 2020 and 2021. But what we’re seeing now is that the average mental health claim. In terms of time off work after that mental health plan is made that the average mental health claim is running

00:09:53:16 – 00:10:10:16
Unknown
for approximately 21 weeks. So consider this a person who goes on stress, leave workers comp stress, leave the average amount of time that they will be off work with that particular condition is 21 weeks. That’s pretty significant. That’s almost six months.

00:10:12:04 – 00:10:28:15
Unknown
Effectively, it’s it’s from what you can see in this list, it’s actually the highest. It’s even higher than, you know, injuries related to nerve and spinal cord, circulatory system diseases and all the other, all the other things that are in this list.

00:10:28:15 – 00:10:47:07
Unknown
So if there’s one other take out from this conversation today is that your mental health is so critically important. one thing we do for our clients is we’ve actually got built into our memberships access to an employee assistance program, which allows people to seek counseling as they need it.

00:10:47:15 – 00:11:04:20
Unknown
We find that’s a good way of preventing people from going off to workers comp. Obviously, once you go off the worker’s comp, then you’re talking about claims and potentially about premiums as well being impacted, whereas EAP can be a really good way of managing those issues before they get to workers comp.

00:11:04:21 – 00:11:14:16
Unknown
People feel like they’ve got an outlet to deal with these issues, they can deal with them prior to it escalating to kind of crisis point. So that’s another really interesting one.