Following on from our summary of Casual Employment Reform – Practical Tips for Employers…
So you are a small business. The good news for you is that you don’t have an obligation to offer permanent conversion to casual employees. You do however have to consider any requests from employees for conversion.
The key steps that you need to take are:
- Issue all casual employees the Casual Employee Information Sheet
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- NOTE: you must issue that to all existing casual employees ASAP after 27 March 2021
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- Check the modern Awards that cover your casual employees. Look in particular for:
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- The right for employees to request conversion after 6 months (rather than 12); and
- Any other notification obligations (some Awards require you to remind the employee within 4 weeks of them becoming eligible to request)
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- Diarise dates as needed to make sure that you
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- Meet your notification obligations if applicable; and
- Are considering in advance of 12 months whether an employee may be eligible for conversion so that you are ready to respond
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- If you receive a request from an employee to convert, respond in writing within 21 days.
If you would like assistance with this, the team at Focus HR are here to help. In fact, we know how tricky this can be to navigate, so we’ve created a Casual Conversion Kit complete with full guidelines, information sheets for employees, and template letters to notify employees of their rights and the respond appropriately to requests. We’ll even check your Award for you so that we are giving you advice tailored to you. If you would like to purchase this kit, contact us and reference the code ‘SBCONVERSION’ for a 10% discount.