Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
How to Employ the Right Person for Your Business
Show Notes
Background
Karen Hillen from My HR Partner delivers HR solutions to help small businesses stop wasting time and money by providing expert on-demand HR services for an affordable monthly fee. She has 30 years HR experience and can help you with all the things you need to have in place when it comes to HR.
Is Your Business Ready for an Employee?
You may think you’re ready to employ somebody, but there might be some other options you can look at first such as outsourcing certain tasks. Write down all the duties that you do in your business and what you would want an employee to do, you may find it’s not an employee you need straight away.
What’s the Difference Between a Part-time and Casual Employee?
A casual employee doesn’t have a guarantee of hours, days, number of hours, or any guarantee of ongoing work. If you think that fits with what you are wanting in an employee, consider hiring a casual employee. A casual employee usually gets paid a loading on what the permanent rate would be and that’s because it compensates them for things like the fact that they don’t get annual leave or public holidays or sick leave, all the leave entitlements that a permanent employee would get. Each country has different loadings and rules and regulations, it’s important to check your local and state obligations for your casuals and your permanent part-time employees.
If you very clearly know that you need somebody to work four hours a day every day, Monday to Friday, and that’s not going to change too much, it makes sense to put somebody on straight away in a permanent part-time position. If employed as permanent, they employee is entitled to annual leave, sick leave, public holidays, all the leave entitlements that a permanent employee gets, but they would get it on a pro rate basis, based on the hours and the days that they work. The big difference is a permanent employee has an obligation to turn up to work when you expect them to, a casual doesn’t.
How Many Hours do you Need to Give a Part-time Person?
The number of hours will depend on the award that the person is employed under. It’s usually three hours a shift in a lot of awards, but that can vary. Another thing to remember too, once somebody works more than five hours, usually they are also entitled to an unpaid lunch break. There are some awards that have a lesser amount, but there are usually some conditions written in the award in relation to minimum hours. This refers to working in Australia, each country or state can be different.
Part time employees are entitled to leave and aren’t expected to work public holidays. For instance, if you were to employ somebody and they were only going to work three or four hours on one day a week, just keep in mind if that’s a Monday, that’s where the majority of public holidays fall. They would be entitled to have that public holiday off, paid, every time a public holiday falls on that day of the week. It’s something to keep in mind when you are looking at what you’re wanting that person to do and the entitlements they would receive.
What Should We Consider When Recruiting a New Employee?
It’s important to clearly think about all the things that they’re going to need to do in their job including what type of equipment they need and the extra items you need to supply such as a desk, mobile phone, uniform, training, insurances. This can be different in different countries and from state to state, so it’s important that you understand what requirements that you have in your state in relation to workers insurances. Taking these into consideration, putting on an employee could be a cost for a period of time until they learn the job.
