Helping Small Business Create Employment Contracts

Business.gov.au have created a build your own employment contract, for an employee under Australia’s Fair Work System, that is tailored to your business needs. Making your employee’s pay and conditions clear from the start can help protect your business in the long term.

It helps small business employers to make a basic employment contract that complies with workplace laws. This tool is recommended for small businesses to create a contract for an employee under the national industrial relations system.

It can be used for full-time, part-time, and casual employees who are covered by an award. For more information: business.gov.au – Get started Employment Contract Tool.

In the tool you’ll find:

• Conditions that you must provide to your employee.
• Optional clauses to help set expectations and protect your business.

To use this tool, you’ll need to pay your employee an hourly or weekly wage. Salaries are not provided in the tool due to their complex requirements but if you’re not sure what the award is, use the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool

The Contract Tool

The contract tool takes you through several steps and helps a business with all of the things that should form an employment contract.

Prepare a position description:

You’ll need to attach the position description to your final contract when you give it to your employee. If you provided a position (or job) description during your recruitment process, use this. If you don’t have a position description yet, you can download the job description template from the Fair Work Ombudsman website and fill it in later.

Once you have filled in all the details in the Contract Tool you can review and download the template and fill in personal details. This tool is aimed at building provisions into a contract template that leads businesses down the right path to compliance. The tool takes business owners through all the processes needed to be considered in an employment contract.

Although this is a useful tool to use when employing and on-boarding staff, it is recommended the appropriate HR advice be obtained by employers.

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Source: The ICB Newsletter, Vol 13 Issue 2, August 2021