One of the comments that keeps coming up revolves around which award covers a particular business.
Now, this is really not surprising - there has not been a strong education process for small to medium sized business about the changes and most are not experts in industrial relations or reading awards.
Without going into great detail, some of the changes effecting small to medium sized businesses include:
- The introduction of modern awards
- The introduction of National Employment Standards
- The move for most from state based to national based awards.
This process of modernisation has resulted in some broad classifications of employment, which for some business people is hard to understand. Once again, with such a large change, this is not surprising - the move to "modernise" awards has led to Modern Awards with very broad coverage and classifications need to be generic enough to allow this.
As an example of this, I was recently working with a business which found it difficult to actually identify the award their employees could be classified under. Going by the classification themselves, it was a difficult exercise, with none in the most obvious award (the General Retail Industry Award 2010) really fitting.
We were able to step our way through a process of identifying the appropriate award and classification, finally ensuring that their employees were employed under the appropriate award. This has allowed them to identify the changes they will need to make over the coming period as the transitional arrangements take affect.
To assist business people to identify their awards I am conducting a free webinar next Tuesday (30 March) at 1pm (Brisbane Time). Titled "Modern Awards and Your Business", the webinar will cover areas like identifying award coverage for your business and other practical areas.
If you would like to reserve your seat on the webinar - click on the following link:
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