As many of our clients are facing uncertainty (and stress) due to COVID-19, I thought I'd provide you with some useful information to help you understand your options as an employer during this time.
The key items businesses should be thinking about are:
Work Health & Safety: It’s important to consider how you meet your workplace health and safety obligations, especially if your employees become sick with coronavirus or have travelled to an affected region. You may also be looking at allowing employees to work from home to protect their health. Fair Work has released a helpful guide which covers all this information, available here.
Business Downturns & Employees: You should consider the impact of business downturns on your employment law obligations. If you’re thinking about asking staff to take paid or unpaid leave, or if you’re facing potential redundancies, it’s important that you’re doing this in a way that’s compliant with employment law. Otherwise, you may be subject to unfair dismissal claims or other penalties.
Contracts: If you are signing or negotiating agreements with customers or suppliers that could be impacted by coronavirus, it’s important to ensure you include provisions regarding cancellations and liability allocation. If you use standard form contracts, it may be worth having these reviewed.
Risk Management: You should think about how your business will manage epidemic risk moving forward, including through training, policies and updates to your standard form agreements.
Hiring: Due to isolation restrictions, or to minimise contact, recorded interviews and video calls with your prospects, is highly effective, and keep you in the game with industry talent that your competition may not have considered.
Building Partners Recruitment have been using several technology platforms for some time, many have proven give our clients an advantage. Recorded video is one of them.
We know this is a stressful time for many businesses and we wish you all the best in navigating these difficult issues. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
If we can't help you directly we can recommend several specialist legal firms who can.
See: wearebpr.com.au or call: 0412 914 547 anytime.
