Hopefully we can help clarify what award interpretation is, and why it should be an integral part of a Time & Attendance system.
Put simply – if an employee is to work outside of ordinary hours, the employee is entitled to certain awards – on top of their ordinary pay rate, and how does the system you use interpret them.
A common comment we hear is – how does this relate to the employee pay or dollar rate? This is essentially the net result at the end of the calculations.
Awards can vary so much between companies, and even down to individuals within a company. It’s important to get the award interpretation set up correctly from the outset. We sit down with our clients in the implementation phase, and map out their rules.
- How many hours has an employee done within a day or pay period?
- What is the outcome when they meet that criteria?
- Meal allowances, anti-social hours, working a particular sequence of hours, when it’s a particular day, a particular hour.
- Conditions can become layered and complex – anything that is based on a quantity of time, or time of day, or perhaps the role they might be working.
Add to that some operational rules and the relationship between awards and the employee roster – what are the parameters that would be considered an early, late start or an absence. Also breaks – are the breaks to be recorded, or automatically deducted? Once we have a clear picture of these things we can then assign the business rules to the employee or groups of employees.
This is how the application will calculate the individual timesheets – based on your business rules, which are the award interpretation rules together with the operational rules. We can then produce accurate exceptions to highlight to managers or supervisors when people have worked outside what is expected.
We are very good at this because we have been doing it for more than 20 years. We have the ability to standardise, but also be very flexible and customised, we can modify quite substantially on an individual basis.
“Award Interpretation is: understanding the conditions upon which something gets paid” Hayden Burnett – iDt Group Director
