PENALTY RATE CUTS: THE NEXT STEPS FOR YOUR BUSINESS

The Fair Work Commission (FWC) threw down the gauntlet last Thursday when they agreed to cutting Sunday and public holiday penalty rates.

The FWC will be implementing changes from March onwards. If you’re a business owner operating in the hospitality, restaurant, fast-food, retail or pharmacy industries, how can you make sure your business doesn’t suffer?

Stay on top of it

The first step is to understand what changes will affect your business. You can read the details in this article but in the meantime, with all the changes to penalty rates for public holidays as well as late-night work loading, it’s more important than ever to stay on top of your payment systems.

There are vocal community groups speaking out against the cuts. Your staff are being warned to double check (or even triple check) their pay slips in the coming months to make sure they’re being paid properly.

So while the decision is good news for businesses — you can stay open for longer outside of normal work hours — there’s also a potential cost to your business if you miscalculate pay.

Forgetting to lower the pay rates in your systems could mean you’re paying more than you have to and losing profits.

Overpaying your employees will hurt your bottom line, but underpaying your employees gets your workers offside. In a worst-case scenario, your business could be another Grill’d or 7-11 — facing a massive community backlash and legal action for underpaying staff. And as we’ve seen in a previous post, underpayment can be the result of a simple administrative error.

From July 1st, the FWC will be enforcing the public holiday penalty rate cuts. Though they’re yet to decide when Sunday penalty rate cuts take effect, you’ll need to adjust your payment systems when the time comes.

Need help?

If keeping up with the FWC’s decisions and updating your payment system is proving to be a challenge, award management software such as easyemployer is a smart solution. We can automatically update your award conditions, so changes flow through without having to lift a finger.

With easyemployer’s automated software you can also update your reward schemes instantly to reduce your administration workload and take the stress out of the next 6 months.

Want to see it in action? View this demo.