By Vaughan Granier

Welcome to part five of this how-to series: let’s talk about diversity and non-compliance.

Diversity and compliance are two very important parts of the process of becoming an Accredited Employer with Immigration New Zealand (INZ). Businesses need to prove they walk the walk when undertaking this process by demonstrating they promote diversity in their workplace and have appropriate processes in place to be and maintain compliance.

In this article, I explain the importance of diversity in the workplace, why businesses must ensure they’re 100 per cent compliant with NZ laws, and how commitment to both is essential in becoming an Accredited Employer.

Any application for accreditation must be proactive in showing that your business is committed to three important processes:

  1. Implementing diversity policy and practices;
  2. Knowing about and dealing with any non-compliance (internal checks and balances, and reporting); and
  3. Keeping compliant with immigration and employment legislation.

The third point is self-explanatory – making sure you have a process in place to keep you informed of any changes in the law. But what do you need to know about the first two?

Diversity

Diversity has some key areas where it’s important to show excellence and proactive management. These include:

  • Gender pay and employment opportunities: As an employer, you must be able to prove that gender doesn’t impact anything from pay differences and training and development opportunities to the ability to gain work experience or the availability of required facilities employees.
  • Employee differences: These can be as obvious as pay differences, but can extend to work allocation and levels of responsibility. For example, if a foreign employee has the same qualifications, job title, and experience, but is restricted to more menial work, smaller teams, or less client-focused roles, this would be clear (but less obvious) discrimination. Discrimination in this area can also include the availability of facilities, such as refusing to accommodate fundamental dietary differences in breakroom areas, lack of accommodation of or provision for religious needs, and might even include a failure to provide or communicate important information (e.g. Health & Safety material) in the employee’s native language.

Positively showing, or confirming, proactive compliance with these and similar areas is a significant achievement.

Dealing with non-compliance (and maintaining compliance)

Generally, non-compliance is only a matter of public record when the Labour Inspectorate conducts an audit, and the findings are so extreme that they publish the outcomes on their website as a warning to other businesses. Behind the scenes, many employers don’t care that their conditions of employment aren’t compliant and will take the chance that they’ll never get caught.

And then there are the employers that make an innocent mistake, but they have good checks and balances in place to easily help them rectify the issue.

The kinds of checks and balances that show a commitment to finding non-compliance proactively, are similar to those that help to ensure ongoing compliance, such as audits. This information should be captured in a series of regular reports that show that the employer cares about and follows up on its compliance.

These include:

  1. Testing payroll calculations regularly to ensure:
    • holiday and absence pay are both correct;
    • minimum pay rates are complied with (e.g., a person earning a full-time salary of $45,000 per year, but working extra hours above 40 for no pay, can easily end up earning less than $21.20 per hour when their annual salary is divided by the number of hours they actually worked) in a particular pay cycle; and
    • termination pay is paid correctly and includes all outstanding entitlements and all deductions are properly authorised.
  1. Auditing employee files to:
    • ensure employment contracts exist for all employees (including long-serving employees who might not have a written agreement in place); and
    • ensures employees are employed on the correct employment type (casual, fixed-term, etc.) changes to employment benefits and conditions are recorded.
  1. Auditing visas to ensure:
    • employees are working within their visa conditions (it’s easy for a local manager to make a business decision that could breach an employee’s visa conditions) (e.g. transferring an employee out of the geographical limits of their visa);
    • no visas have expired; and
    • employees on visas haven’t been promoted into jobs their visa doesn’t cover.
  1. Auditing Health & Safety records to check:
    • consistency of regular meetings and keeping minutes;
    • Health & Safety training;
    • PPE safety checks; and
    • reports, statistics and investigations.

The requirement to prove compliance also includes policies and procedures that can give INZ the confidence that your business is set up to consistently remain compliant into the future (as opposed to a “snapshot” as of today) with the minimum requirements of New Zealand employment law. These policies and processes have already been outlined in a previous article.

And it doesn’t end there: employers with Union membership must be aware that INZ will also obtain feedback on all of the above from Unions and employee representatives.

The team at HR Assured are experts in human resources and workplace compliance practices. If you’re interested in how we can help you become an Accredited Employer, contact us.

Other articles in the series:

Vaughan Granier is the National Workplace Relations Manager for HR Assured NZ. He has over 24 years’ experience in international human resources, health and safety, and workplace relations management. With over 13 years working in New Zealand and Australian companies, he provides in-depth support to leadership teams across all areas of HR, Health and Safety, and employee management.