Under Australian workplace law, employers are required to give their employees adequate breaks. Managing these break entitlements is an essential part of looking after your team, boosting productivity, and ensuring compliance.
However, break entitlements vary across industries and awards. As the nature and patterns of work change, so do employee rest needs. So, when your workforce covers multiple awards, managing varied break rules and scenarios throughout your rosters can get complicated.
In Australia, employers are responsible for ensuring that employees receive adequate breaks. Entitlements are prescribed by Australian workplace law and are also outlined in award or enterprise agreements.
The factors influencing break entitlements include the industry and nature of work involved, employment type (such as full-time, part-time, or casual), and the award or agreement covering the employee. Break entitlements can include rest and meal breaks, which may be paid or unpaid.
There are a variety of challenges that employers face when complying with break entitlement rules.
Limited control and visibility
If your workers complete their shifts at a client's site, you will often have no direct control over when or how breaks are taken. This is a particular challenge for labour hire businesses, and for many, break compliance can be seen as too hard to control in practice. Many agencies also fear that pushing for more oversight would overwhelm their clients, who are already struggling to manage daily operations. This can lead to a focus on ensuring breaks exist on paper, rather than verifying their timing or quality.
Record keeping
Many businesses rely on signed timesheets as their source of truth. However, these can lack specific details about when breaks were taken or whether they were paid or unpaid. People often make manual adjustments during the shift approval process, correcting errors as they spot them. However, not having a systemised way of capturing break times can also make it hard to prove compliance in an audit.
Award rule complexity
Awards and workplace agreements can specify different rules for paid and unpaid breaks, varying by role and industry. For example, if you have shift, weekend, and day workers, you may have different break entitlements that kick in for all of them. Managers can struggle to keep up with every detail. As a result, compliance efforts can end up focusing on ensuring that a break was taken at some point, rather than matching strict award timing or type.
Tech adoption
Employees, particularly those who are less tech-savvy, can forget to clock breaks or provide irrelevant information. Some employees are resistant to using digital systems at all, resulting in supervisors needing to chase up staff or rely on trust rather than records.
Operational pressures
Operational pressures can reduce the likelihood of breaks being taken. For example, some work sites have a culture of working through breaks if they are very busy.
Businesses that need to maintain service continuity or high output at all times can also struggle to meet all award entitlements.
Smaller businesses with resource constraints can also feel that meeting their break compliance obligations, such as validating if a break was taken, is an unmanageable administrative burden.
Without detailed records, it can become almost impossible for businesses to prove to auditors that breaks have been taken as required by law or award. The barriers to maintaining break compliance also span operations, technology, and people — calling for streamlined processes that make scheduling and tracking breaks easy.
Automated break rules
Using foundU, you can set up break rules that automatically insert paid and unpaid breaks into shifts. This reduces the risk of managers forgetting to add them to rosters and supports compliance with award requirements. For example, you can use automation to add a break for shifts over six hours, when breaks are mandatory under many awards.
You can also configure the platform to align with more specific award rules, such as requiring a 30-minute unpaid meal break and a 20-minute rest break after 8 hours, as well as additional breaks after 10 hours.
The break schedule test will also help you confirm how your breaks are applied to shifts of different times, giving you more confidence in your rule configuration. This helps businesses stay compliant with complex award structures, without adding any additional administrative burden.
Live break alerts on rosters
Online rosters are one of the best places to visualise your breaks. Using foundU, you can simply hover your mouse over a shift to see a breakdown of the breaks applied to it. If you edit a shift, your break rules will automatically be applied, ensuring that the right number of breaks and types are scheduled. If you have unique operational requirements, you can still further customise your shifts on the roster.
Easy break recording for employees
If your workforce is spread across many sites and locations, then you need a way for employees to record their breaks. Using foundU’s employee app or iPad kiosk, employees can easily sign in and out, creating a real-time data stream of time and attendance, as well as breaks taken. This setup is perfect for restaurant and factory settings, where you want workers to be able to clock in and out, and take their breaks without creating any line-ups.
You can also control the level of detail required from employees when they try to clock out from their shift, but haven't taken their assigned break.
By making break clocking easy, businesses can build an audit trail and proactively address any compliance issues. It also reduces the need for manual timesheet adjustments.
The ability to approve shifts
Managers should be able to review and approve shifts, including break times, before payroll is processed. This approval process is a key checkpoint for ensuring break compliance and correcting discrepancies.
In foundU, when you use the time and attendance page, you can hover your mouse over a shift to see the break times that are about to be approved and make adjustments based on any shift notes an employee has submitted. If you need to conduct further analysis, you can easily export the shift data.
Break reporting capability
Using your time, attendance, and break data, you can regularly run compliance health checks. In foundU, paid and unpaid break data is clearly differentiated in labour management reports and exports. These reports can also be used for audits or to check for incorrect break entries before payroll is processed.
Overcoming complexity
Complex award rules and break entitlements don’t have to keep you up at night. Using the right technology, you can streamline break management and easily maintain compliance.
Want to learn more about how foundU makes break management easy? Book a demo with one of our product experts.