Under some Modern Awards and Enterprise Agreements, employees are entitled to be paid at a higher rate when performing certain duties. This concept is most commonly known as 'higher duties.'
Fair Work Australia provides the following definition of higher duties:
For example, an employee might do the work of a higher-level employee while that employee is on leave. This is also known as working at ‘higher duties’.
If an employee is temporarily performing higher duties, they may be:
performing tasks they wouldn’t normally perform
taking on extra responsibility.
When this happens, the employee may be entitled to a higher award pay rate for the time they work at the higher level.
Under some awards, an employee has to work at the higher classification for a minimum period before being entitled to payment at the higher pay rate.
This help guide will detail how you can apply higher duties throughout Tanda, including tagging employees who are eligible for higher duties and automatically linking higher duties rules to your Teams.
Configuring Your Award Rules
IMPORTANT: Before you can automate higher duty payments in your account, you must first configure award rules that pay the applicable higher duty.
For further information on creating higher duties award rules in your account, see the below help articles:
If you use a Tanda Modern Award Template, see Payroll Configuration: Higher Duties.
If you are using custom award rules, see creating your own award rules.
Once you have configured higher duties in your Modern Award Template or via custom rules, you can then automate their application via Teams.
Tag Employees Who are Eligible to be Paid the Higher Duty
Firstly, to make it easier to view and edit higher duties on timesheets, enable the setting to view and edit higher duties tags manually on timesheets.
To enable this setting, navigate to Settings > Timesheets > View all timesheet settings > Show Advanced Settings, then tick Show an extra dropdown to adjust shift cost (Award Tag). Click Update Settings at the bottom of the page to save your changes.
Enabling this setting allows for the higher duties tag to be added to an applicable employee's timesheet.
Linking Higher Duties Award Rules to Teams
To automatically apply higher duties via Teams, navigate to Workforce > Teams, then click the pen icon on the Team you would like to edit. Next, scroll down and select Show advanced options.
Then, look for the 'Associated Tags' heading. Under Associated Tags search for the higher duties rate you would like to associate with this team.
For example, in the team below called 'Bar,' all employees must be paid at a minimum Level 3 rate. To do this, the Level 2 Higher Duties tag can be saved in the below field:
Now, when employees have both the higher duties tag saved to their employee profile (via the Pay Conditions tab) and work in this team, Level 2 higher duty rates will apply automatically to their timesheet.
Please see the below example of what this looks like. The grey icon indicates that a tag is associated with the team and is applying:
