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With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, many companies have quickly adopted the practice of employees working from home and employees will no doubt work out how to do this effectively over time but what you, as an employer may not realise is the extent of responsibility you still have for your remote worker.

As a business owner, it is my responsibility to anticipate threats to my business and manage those risks. Still, I must admit to being caught a little short when it came to the impact of the Coronavirus.

In a recent article, I commented on the potential administrative nightmare caused by complying with the new Annualised Salary Provisions. The provisions require that accurate records of hours worked are used to make comparisons against those hours of work specified within the agreed Annualised Salary Arrangement (ASA). The ASA has two main elements which trigger a required additional payment to employees. The Triggers The first is when an employees hours exceeds the "Outer Limits" of ordinary and overtime within a pay period. These additional hours must be paid within the relevant pay period for hours worked.

Many companies are aware ( although many are not) that changes to the Annualised Salary provisions in many awards take effect 1st March 2020. These changes are to protect employees from underpayment, and they include measures to both improve the transparency of the Annualised Salary Agreement and, more significantly for employers, a requirement to measure actual hours worked. Here are the changes which most affect employers. These changes may vary between awards to some degree.

It may come as a surprise to many that one of the most common methods of calculating employee attendance hours may be a breach of the Fair Work Act. I am referring to the common practice of rounding employee start times forward and docking their time accordingly if they are late. In practical terms, it goes like this...

One of the most common questions I am asked is why some time and attendance products are so much cheaper than others. Here is a plain and simple comparison of budget time clocks against quality time and attendance systems.

Entry-level time clocks are time and attendance products which provide accurate employee attendance times but are somewhat limited in the higher functionality that you can expect from an enterprise-class system.