November 2023 news
14 November 2023
Accredited Employer Work Visa
If you have become an accredited employer for overseas recruitment, from the 29 October you are no longer able to include a 90-day trial period in employment agreements. You can read more about this on Immigration NZ website.
Closedown periods
With the Christmas/New Year break rapidly approaching we are receiving queries about closing practices for the days between Christmas and New Year statutory public holidays.
Some businesses will observe an annual closedown. This applies when the business customarily closes down for this period each year. There are specific requirements under the Holidays Act, and in most cases you will have included a ‘Close Down’ clause in your employment agreements. This should detail your obligations around the notification period, what happens in terms of employees using annual holiday entitlement and what happens if they don’t have the annual leave entitlement or don’t have enough leave to cover the period. We have content about this at Close down periods (healthypractice.co.nz)
If you don’t customarily close down over this period but have decided that this year you would like to close, you need to do this in consultation with staff. You can direct your staff to use entitled leave with at least 14 days’ notice if you can’t come to agreement, but you may find that you will have to pay your staff for the days that you have chosen to close.
Annual Holidays
You and your staff will be planning their summer holidays and for some managers it will be a juggling act managing staff expectations about leave and having sufficient staff to provide services.
In general, annual holidays should be taken by agreement. When there are popular periods for leave like around Christmas and Easter, you need to be sure that you have a fair process for dealing with leave requests and allocation. We would recommend having a leave policy and an application process and we have sample templates at this link Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz)
Calculating holiday pay for permanent employees can be confusing. The rate of holiday pay must be paid at the greater of the employee’s ordinary pay or average weekly earnings over the last 12 months. Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz) The payment is different for employees returning from parental leave Annual holidays (healthypractice.co.nz)
Other recent articles
11 March 2025
Upcoming Changes
This newsletter we are highlighting upcoming changes – in the near future when you log onto HealthyPractice you will notice that the website has had a refresh and will be sporting the new MAS branding. On 1 April 2025 the adult minimum wage will increase from $23.15 to $23.50. The training wage also increases from $18.52 to $18.80. We are also highlighting some of the Coalition Government changes they are considering making to legislation in the employment space. These will probably be brought before the house in the second half of this year. The changes aim to boost productivity, simplify hiring and firing and reduce compliance costs.
10 December 2024
Christmas Greetings
The years seem to be shorter and shorter and 2024 has passed in a flash. We hope that you are looking forward to some days off as much as we are. It has been another busy year and a very challenging one for many practices.
19 November 2024
Resilience in challenging times
Working in a health practice is a challenging environment. It’s always busy and the people you are dealing with are often stressed and facing difficult situations. Workforce shortages are affecting all areas of health, which in turn leads to pressure on your practice staff as they need to work longer hours and deal with more complex patients, often doing more with less.
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