A roster helps you plan who is going to turn up for work and when, making it one of the best places to stop compliance issues before they happen. Using combined rostering and workforce management technology, you can maintain compliance throughout the entire shift lifecycle and ensure that qualified employees turn up to work.
Supervisors are responsible for ensuring that only compliant employees are working on-site. If an employee doesn’t hold the right qualifications or meet industry requirements, their presence can pose safety, compliance, and operational risks.
However, the time pressures of managing a site can prevent supervisors from checking compliance documents. By the time an employee arrives for work, there are already operational demands to meet.
Industries with strict requirements, such as hospitality, construction, childcare, health care, and recreation, need all hands on deck and can’t afford to turn an employee around by the time they turn up on site.
It’s also important that adequate breaks and allowances are factored into your roster, so that all shifts meet the relevant award requirements and enterprise bargaining agreements.
In this guide, we’ll explore five steps you can take to build a compliant roster and meet your operational requirements.
Compliance starts with employee onboarding and rostering. When you add a new team member to your workforce, it’s important to collect all of the important information from them, including tax details, qualifications, and licenses. Using foundU, you can capture and sign off on these compliance records early on. Think RSA’s, white cards for construction, blue cards, working with children checks, visa documentation, VEVO checks, and first aid qualifications.
Staff can upload their information and review policies before they start work. They can also be restricted from being rostered until they have submitted all mandatory fields and are approved to work.
Save all of your employees and candidates in your workforce management platform. By giving each employee a dedicated profile, you can create a central repository of their positions, roles, and compliance information. Set up automatic alerts for document expiry and send information or signature requests to maintain records over time.
In foundU, you can also tag each employee profile according to their role, qualification, age, and many other conditions. This makes it easy to search for groups of candidates with the right requirements you need to fill specific shifts.
If an employee doesn’t hold the right qualifications or meet industry requirements, their presence can pose safety, compliance, and operational risks. That means they shouldn’t be rostered.
To ensure that every employee who turns up for work meets compliance requirements, you can set restrictions on shifts. This automation will stop them from being added to shifts if their information has expired or they don’t meet the right requirements for the work site.
By checking records for currency at the point of shift creation, you’ll feel more comfortable that your rosters are compliant and take the pressure off on-site supervisors.
Link each employee profile to the correct industry awards or enterprise agreements within your platform. This will ensure that break entitlements, pay rates, and other compliance requirements are automatically applied based on the employee’s classification. It’s particularly important to roster the right breaks for your team, so you can make sure they’re well rested and that you’re covered throughout the day.
Whether you need to factor in paid or unpaid breaks, you can use foundU’s break scheduling tool to set break durations that match the length of a shift, add multiple breaks, and set custom break labels. This ensures that the breaks in your roster align with award requirements and working conditions.
foundU's award interpretation engine will also trigger live alerts on your roster if a compliance rule isn’t being met. For example, if overtime is kicking in or you’re not meeting a working condition.
Ensure your workforce management system can store detailed reports showing who was rostered, their qualifications, whether or not breaks have been taken, and their compliance status. This will ensure you’re ready for Fair Work audits, work cover claims, and internal reviews.
By embedding compliance into your upstream workforce management workflows, you can protect your business, support your staff, and ensure you’re always ready for an audit. You’ll be able to build compliant rosters and resilient operations, helping you balance legal requirements and demand.
Want to learn more about how foundU makes managing compliance easy? Book a demo with one of our product experts.