Large Business Casual Conversion Practical Tips

Following on from our summary of Casual Employment Reform – Practical Tips for Employers…

As a large business, there are slightly ‘heavier’ obligations on you.

Under the NES, you have an obligation to be proactive.

Large employers must offer to convert a casual employee to permanent employment if they:

• Have been employed for 12 months;
• During the last 6 months has worked regular and systematic pattern of hours without significant adjustment; and
• Could continue working those hours as a permanent employee without significant changes to their employment.

Unless you have reasonable business grounds to not make the offer.  These grounds must be based on facts that are known or reasonably foreseeable at the time of deciding not to make the offer.

You also need to consider any requests that you receive from employees to convert after 27th September, again applying reasonable business grounds.

The key steps that you need to take are:

• • Issue all casual employees with the Casual Employee Information Sheet
    • NOTE: you must issue that to all existing casual employees by 27th September 2021 at the latest
  • Check the modern Awards that cover your casual employees. Look in particular for:
    • 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)
  • Diarise dates as needed to make sure that you:
    • 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 make the required offer/notification of no offer.
  • Within 21 days of an employee’s 12-month anniversary, either offer conversion to permanent or provide written notice that you will not be offering casual conversion including the reason for this
  • 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 ‘LBCONVERSION’ for a 10% discount.