Casual Conversion – How to identify regular patterns of work

“Casual conversion” is the name given to the process under which casual employees in Australia are offered or have a right to request conversion to become a full-time employee or a part-time employee.

Under the National Employment Standards, the right to request casual conversion to full-time employment or part-time employment depends on whether the casual employee has a regular pattern of work. This is not the same as whether the casual employee worked regular and systematic hours.

What do I need?

You are looking for patterns over the employee’s last 6 months of employment. So you need to get their timesheets for the previous 6 months.

If you are like us, you will want to find a nicer way to look for patterns than looking at a list of timesheets. Graphs and heat maps are excellent tools to help.

Regular patterns based on shift length

One pattern you are looking for is patterns based on the casual employee’s shift length. For example, if the employee worked 8 hour shifts every Monday, Tuesday and Friday, then they most likely have a regular pattern of hours.

Some patterns aren’t going to be that obvious, so picturing the pattern as a graph is really helpful. Here’s an example, from Tanda’s Casual Conversion Dashboard:

This graph shows:

• bars representing the minimum, average (mean) and maximum shift length in hours for each day over the last six months; and
• the number of shifts actually worked each day.

The strongest patterns will have very similar minimum, average and maximum shift lengths, as well as a high number of shifts relative to the roster length (e.g. 26 shifts for a 1 week roster length).

Regular patterns based on working particular days and times

Heat maps are an excellent way to visualise patterns in a casual employee’s days worked at particular times of the day. Again, here is an example from Tanda’s Casual Conversion Dashboard:

In this case, the employee has worked 22 shifts on Thursday across 12 noon and 7pm.

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