Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners and senior people leaders. No noise. No jargon.
Two stories this week that look unrelated but aren't.
UKVI changed how it monitors sponsor compliance on 8 April, shifting from periodic audits to continuous, automated surveillance of your PAYE data. Most businesses with a sponsor licence haven't noticed yet.
New research shows that one in five UK employees isn't taking their full annual leave, with managers the most likely to skip it. That sounds like a wellbeing story. It's also a legal liability story, and the new ERA record-keeping duty has just made it more urgent.
Both stories are about the same thing: compliance obligations that sit in the background, accumulating risk, until something forces them into view.
UKVI Is Already Reading Your PAYE Data. Most HR Teams Don't Know.
This is the compliance change that landed almost without notice. For any business holding a sponsor licence, it matters considerably.
Since 8 April, UKVI fundamentally changed how it monitors sponsor compliance, shifting from periodic audits to continuous, automated data-matching against live HMRC PAYE data. Your payroll submissions are now being cross-referenced against your sponsor records in real time.
What that means in practice: the old model of preparing for a scheduled audit is gone. The system flags mismatches automatically. Pay-period discrepancies between what you reported to UKVI and what appears in your real-time HMRC submissions. Job title drift where an employee's actual role no longer matches the Standard Occupational Classification code on their sponsor record. Reporting gaps when salary changes, unpaid leave or secondments aren't notified within the required ten-day window.
These aren't deliberate violations. They're operational gaps that emerge as businesses grow, restructure or adapt. Under the new data-matching regime, they generate red flags, and UKVI treats them as potential compliance failures.
The stakes are not trivial. Penalties for employing foreign workers illegally range from £45,000 per breach for a first offence and £60,000 for repeat offences. A revoked sponsor licence doesn't just affect sponsored employees. It halts recruitment, disrupts workforce planning, and can take between six and twelve months to reinstate, if reinstatement is granted at all.
The most common failure points are predictable once you know what UKVI is looking for. A salary temporarily reduced during unpaid leave, not reported within ten days. An employee promoted to a new title that no longer matches their Certificate of Sponsorship. A secondment to a different site that wasn't flagged. None of these feel like compliance failures in the moment. All of them now generate an automatic red flag.
The new threshold is a reasonable suspicion standard. UKVI can act on data patterns without giving you advance warning or an opportunity to remedy minor errors first. HR leaders who continue preparing for the old audit-based model will keep encountering compliance failures they didn't see coming.
Your Managers Aren't Taking Their Holiday. That's Your Legal Problem.
New research from Timetastic found that around one in five UK employees failed to use their full annual leave entitlement last year due to work pressures. Over a quarter finished the year with more than fifteen unused days. Mid-level managers and supervisors were the most likely group to skip holidays. Around a quarter said they felt unable to step away. Nearly one in ten said they felt guilty simply for taking their earned leave.
This is easy to read as a wellbeing observation. It's also a legal liability story, and one with sharper edges than most employers realise.
Under UK law, employers cannot simply allow statutory leave to go unused and move on. Where employees fail to take it, employers must demonstrate they actively encouraged staff to use their holiday. If they cannot show that, forfeiture of leave may be deemed unfair or unlawful. Holiday entitlement compliance is an operational responsibility, not a passive contractual one. Employers must actively manage leave, planning capacity, approving requests fairly and ensuring managers do not discourage holiday use.
The financial exposure compounds over time. Untaken statutory annual leave is treated as wages for the purposes of employment law. Where an employer failed to actively enable the taking of leave, carry-over can be indefinite, until the employer remedies the failure or employment ends. That creates hidden historic liability that tends to surface at the most expensive moment: when an employee leaves, raises a grievance or brings a tribunal claim.
Layer the new ERA record-keeping duty on top of that. From 6 April 2026, employers must keep adequate records demonstrating compliance with annual leave entitlements, retained for six years. If an employee who hasn't taken their full leave for three years raises a claim, you need to show not just what their entitlement was, but that you actively enabled them to take it. Without those records, you're starting the conversation at a disadvantage.
The manager piece is the practical pressure point. Managers are the group most likely to accumulate unused leave, and they're also the people who set the cultural signal for everyone below them. A manager who never takes a proper holiday sends a message, whether they intend to or not. A business that allows its managers to sit on unused leave isn't just storing up a wellbeing risk. It's storing up a liability.
Two compliance stories this week. One brand new, one hiding in plain sight.
The UKVI change is the more urgent for any business with sponsored workers. The system is already running. The data is already being matched. The businesses that act now, auditing their sponsor records against their PAYE submissions, will find any gaps while they still have time to remedy them. The ones that wait will find them in a compliance letter.
The annual leave story is slower-burning but equally real. The legal obligation to actively enable holiday isn't new, but the ERA record-keeping duty has given it teeth, and the Fair Work Agency now has the remit to pursue it. A workforce where managers are accumulating leave and employees are running on empty is a liability on multiple levels.
That's what we help with.
Practical sessions covering difficult conversations, absence, performance, family leave and redundancy process. Plain English, built around your business.
Access to the latest Applicant Tracking and HR Information Systems (ATS and HRIS), AI-powered tools to make your organisation more effective and efficient.
Using our 3GL™ diagnostic framework, we assess the health of your organisation as one of our Accredited Consultants meets with you and provides a report on areas of strength and focus.
If any of it is useful, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
The ONS released its April labour market data last week. The headline numbers look stable. Look a layer deeper and a more uncomfortable picture emerges.
Private sector wages are no longer keeping up. Vacancies are at their lowest point since 2021. And a separate study found that nearly a third of workers are actively undermining their employer's AI rollout, rising to nearly half among Gen Z employees.
Three stories this week. All pointing to the same underlying challenge: the relationship between employers and their people is under strain, and the businesses that recognise it earliest will be the ones that handle it best.
Private Sector Pay Is Flatlined. Your Retention Risk Isn't.
The ONS April labour market release confirms that annual wage growth in the UK fell to 3.6% for regular earnings, its weakest level in over five years. The picture splits sharply by sector: public sector regular pay grew at 5.2% over the past year, while private sector regular pay increased at just 3.2%, exactly matching the rate of inflation. In real terms, private sector wages are going nowhere.
Vacancies fell to their lowest level since February to April 2021, with a quarterly drop of 29,000 and an annual fall of 65,000. A softer jobs market might look like good news for employers — less competition for candidates, more applicants per role. And in the short term, that's true. But the dynamic cuts both ways.
When the jobs market tightens, employees stay put. But staying put and being engaged are different things. ONS data shows four in ten workers are already cutting back on food and essentials as the cost of living continues to bite. Private sector employees whose wages are growing at 3.2%, effectively zero after inflation, are already feeling the squeeze. They may not be leaving. But they're noticing.
The public/private pay gap is particularly sharp for organisations that compete with the public sector or large corporates for similar roles — finance, administration, HR, communications, digital. The premium once offered by private sector career progression and culture needs to be real and clearly communicated, not assumed.
With the Iran conflict continuing to contribute to inflationary pressure, the prospects for real wage growth in the private sector look increasingly concerning through the rest of the year.
Nearly Half of Your Gen Z Employees May Be Sabotaging Your AI Rollout
This one is worth sitting with.
A new report from enterprise AI firm Writer and research firm Workplace Intelligence, based on a survey of 2,400 knowledge workers across the US, UK and Europe, found that 29% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their company's AI strategy. Among Gen Z workers specifically, that figure rises to 44%.
The sabotage takes multiple forms. Some employees are entering proprietary information into unauthorised public AI tools. Others are outright refusing to use approved tools. Some have admitted to deliberately producing low-quality output to make AI appear less effective, or to tampering with performance reviews to skew results against the technology.
The motivation is not hard to understand. Of employees who admitted to sabotage, 30% cited fear of losing their job as the primary driver. Gen Z workers, many of whom hold the entry-level and knowledge-based roles most exposed to AI automation are not being irrational. They're responding to a genuinely uncertain situation with the tools available to them.
But the data on outcomes is stark. AI super-users — employees who have mastered generative AI to a high degree - are around three times more likely to have received both a promotion and a pay rise in the past year compared to those who have been slow to adopt. Top AI users are also saving nearly nine hours per week. Sabotage, in other words, guarantees the outcome the saboteurs fear most.
77% of executives said employees who refuse to become proficient in AI won't be considered for promotions or leadership roles. The lesson for business owners and HR leaders isn't to crack down on resistance. It's to understand what's driving it. Fear of redundancy, lack of transparency about how AI will be used, no clear communication about what it means for individual roles, these are change management failures, not technology failures.
43% of Businesses Have No Wellbeing Strategy. The Cost Is Starting to Show.
The government's Keep Britain Working review, updated this month, confirms that over 2.8 million people are now economically inactive due to health conditions, 800,000 more than in 2019. The cost to the state is estimated at £212 billion per year. That's a national problem. But it starts in individual workplaces, one absence at a time.
New research published this week found that 43% of UK companies have no formal health and wellbeing strategy. For those without one, the approach to employee health is typically reactive addressing problems after they've escalated rather than before. The organisations seeing measurable impact are those that simplify access to support, intervene early and embed wellbeing into the design of work itself.
The shift in 2026 is from broad awareness campaigns to practical, personalised support — clear mental health pathways, earlier intervention, and a much stronger focus on equipping managers to notice changes in behaviour and have supportive conversations before problems escalate.
The manager piece matters more than most strategies acknowledge. Line managers need to be equipped to notice changes in behaviour and confidently signpost support, without being expected to diagnose. When they're not, when a manager spots someone struggling but doesn't know what to say or where to point them, the window for early intervention closes. Absence follows. Recovery takes longer. The cost is real.
The evidence is clear: when employers and employees work together to design better jobs and earlier access to support, sickness absence decreases, people stay in jobs longer, and it's easier to recruit. The results typically pay for themselves within three years in most sectors.
Three stories this week, one thread running through all of them: the gap between what employers assume about their people and what their people are actually experiencing.
Private sector wages flatlined. A third of employees quietly working against AI rollouts. Nearly half of businesses with no plan for when someone isn't coping. None of these are crisis-level failures, they're the kind of slow drift that's easy to miss until it shows up in attrition, performance or absence.
The businesses that handle this period well won't be the ones who respond hardest when something goes wrong. They'll be the ones who stayed close enough to their people to know things were going wrong before it got expensive.
That's what we help with.
Practical sessions covering difficult conversations, absence, performance, family leave and redundancy process. Plain English, built around your business.
Access to the latest AI-powered wellbeing tools to help you and your managers spot early signs before they become a problem.
Not sure where to start? A fast, practical picture of where to focus attention to further enhance the performance of your business.
If any of it is useful, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
A quieter week following the advent of the ERA and the FWA . SO, we have a chance to explore some other, at least, equally important stuff.
This week Gallup published its annual State of the Global Workplace report and the numbers are striking and point to just what a state the workplace is in. Nearly half of employees reported as stressed. Only one in ten engaged. And the people feeling it the hardest? The managers.
Elsewhere, the hiring market is showing signs of life but only in the right places, and only for businesses that are hiring well rather than just hiring fast.
Two stories this week. Both connected by the same underlying question: do you know how your people are actually doing?
Nearly Half of UK Employees Are Stressed. Most of Their Managers Are Unaware.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published this week and based on surveys across 160 countries, found that 46% of UK employees experienced stress "a lot" the previous day. That's higher than the European average of 39% and the global average of 40%, and the highest level recorded since Gallup started measuring UK workplace stress in 2010.
Those first two numbers together tell a story. Nearly half your workforce is stressed. Only ten percent are genuinely engaged. The gap in between (the people who are present but disconnected) is where productivity drops, retention risk builds, and early burnout takes hold.
Gallup's deeper analysis found that the decline in engagement since 2022 is primarily driven by a steeper fall among managers specifically. Manager engagement has dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. And because managers account for around 70% of team engagement variance, their disengagement cascades downward through their teams.
Leaders and managers also reported higher levels of stress, anger, sadness and loneliness than individual contributors. Gallup found that leadership roles now offer little upside in terms of positive emotions. These are not people who are thriving in their roles. They are people absorbing pressure from above and below, with less support than the job now requires.
Clearly this is a phenomenon taking place inside many organisations. Whilst all employees are struggling, it's the managers who are dealing with this in their teams, whilst they themselves struggle, often less demonstrably. The people in the middle, carrying increasing operational load, fielding more HR complexity, managing more difficult conversations, with less time, less support and less clarity about what's expected of them.
Nearly one in three UK employers admits their managers lack the time, training or resources to meaningfully support staff mental health. Over one in three workers does not feel comfortable discussing stress with their manager — up three percentage points from last year.
If managers aren't equipped to spot early signs of stress in their teams — and aren't being supported themselves — the problem compounds. The cost shows up later in sickness absence, attrition and performance. By then it's expensive to fix.
The Hiring Market Is Thawing — But Only for the Right Roles
REC chief executive Neil Carberry noted this week that with the cost shocks of the 2024 Budget having worked through the system, firms began to thaw out long-frozen growth plans. The recovery, where it exists, is uneven.
CIPD senior labour market economist James Cockett has been consistent in his view that demand for tech, digital and high-skilled roles will remain highly selective, while demand for lower-skilled and entry-level roles faces a longer recovery. Unemployment is still forecast to peak toward the middle of the year before a gradual improvement in the second half.
What that means practically: the market is bifurcated. If you're hiring for specialist, technical or senior roles, you're still competing hard for a small pool — and you need to move decisively when you find the right person. If you're hiring for operational, admin or generalist roles, you're in a stronger position than you've been for years, with more candidates and more time to be selective.
The risk in both cases is hiring quickly at the expense of hiring well. Two in five employers now expect to hire fewer permanent workers as a result of the Employment Rights Act reforms, which means the hires you do make carry more weight, not less. A bad hire in a tighter headcount is proportionally more damaging. And from July, a bad hire also comes with faster unfair dismissal exposure.
The businesses managing this well are treating hiring as a process that starts before the job goes live — with a clear brief, a structured interview approach, a realistic probation plan, and a manager who knows what good looks like in the role before they meet the first candidate. That's not complicated. It's just deliberate.
Employer brand matters more in this market than many SMEs realise. When candidate volume is high but quality is uneven, the businesses that attract the right people, rather than just the most people, are the ones with a clear story about who they are and why someone would want to work there. That story doesn't need a big budget. It needs to be honest and consistent.
The Gallup data this week is the most important thing we've covered in a while — not because the numbers are surprising, but because they confirm what most business owners sense but rarely measure. Their people are stressed. Their managers are under pressure. Engagement is low. And the cost of all three is real, even when it doesn't show up as a line on the P&L.
The good news is that Gallup's own research is equally clear on what moves the dial: manager capability. Organisations where managers are equipped, supported and genuinely engaged see team engagement nearly four times higher than the average. That's causation, not coincidence.
Practical sessions covering difficult conversations, absence, performance, family leave and redundancy process. Plain English, built around your business.
Access to the latest AI-powered wellbeing tools to help you and your managers spot the early signs before they become a problem.
Not sure where to start? A fast, practical picture of where you stand following the ERA changes — what needs attention and what can wait.
Get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
Last week the law changed. This week, things got complicated.
The Employment Rights Act changes bedded in on Monday. The Fair Work Agency opened its doors on Tuesday. And on the same day, tens of thousands of resident doctors walked out across NHS England — in the longest strike of a three-year pay dispute, timed to hit hardest over the Easter holidays.
The week has a theme: what happens when the people doing critical work feel their pay doesn't reflect it. That's a question that runs well beyond the NHS. It's one every business owner should be reflecting on.
Here's what you need to know.
The NHS Doctors' Strike: What It Means for Your Business
Resident doctors across England began a six-day walkout on 7 April, rejecting a 3.5% government pay offer after talks collapsed over what the BMA said was a failure to address years of real-terms pay erosion. The BMA argues that doctors' pay remains 20% below 2008 levels in real terms and has called for a 26% increase to restore it.
NHS England set a target of maintaining 95% of scheduled services during the strike, redeploying senior doctors and non-striking staff to cover the gaps. The timing — across Easter, when staffing was already stretched — compounded the pressure. NHS chief Jim Mackey described it as deliberately calculated to cause maximum disruption.
Why does this matter if your business has nothing to do with healthcare? Two reasons.
First, practical: if any of your employees or their families need non-urgent NHS treatment this week, expect delays. That feeds into sickness absence, planned leave disruption and background stress levels that are easy to underestimate.
Second, and more importantly: this dispute is a vivid illustration of what happens when pay drift goes unaddressed for long enough. The running cost of NHS strike action since 2023 has now exceeded £3 billion. Four years. A workforce that felt consistently undervalued. No credible plan for resolution on either side. None of that is inevitable — it's the compounded cost of a people problem that was never treated as a commercial priority.
Pay transparency, clear progression frameworks, and honest conversations about what a business can offer — these aren't soft extras. They're what stops a quiet grievance becoming a structural problem.
The ERA Is Live. Now the Manager Conversations Begin.
The compliance work is done — or it should be. Contracts updated, payroll adjusted, policies rewritten. But the Employment Rights Act 2025 doesn't live in your documents. It lives in the conversations your managers are having every day.
A new starter requests paternity leave on their third day. An employee calls in sick for the first time and asks about SSP. A manager waves it away with "you don't qualify yet." That last response is now legally wrong — and the liability rests with you, not the manager.
The gap between what your documents say and what your managers do is where most employment tribunal claims are born. Not from deliberate wrongdoing. From an uninformed line manager making a call that felt reasonable in the moment, in a situation the law has just changed.
The areas to cover are straightforward: day-one SSP and how to record it properly. Paternity and parental leave requests from new starters — what employees are entitled to and what you can and can't ask. Absence management in a world where every absence from day one is a potential SSP trigger. And redundancy — because the doubling of the protective award means any restructuring conversation now carries significantly higher stakes if the process isn't followed correctly.
The July Hiring Cliff. Thirteen Weeks and Counting.
We've mentioned this before, but the window is closing and most businesses still haven't acted. Anyone employed from 1 July 2026 onwards will have the right to claim unfair dismissal after just six months of service, when the qualifying period reduces from two years to six months on 1 January 2027.
That's thirteen weeks away.
The businesses that are prepared are redesigning their probation processes now — not as a legal exercise, but as a practical management tool. Clear expectations set on day one. Regular documented check-ins. Written feedback that evidences the conversation, not just the conclusion. A six-month process that gives you a defensible record if things don't work out.
The businesses that aren't will find themselves in January 2027 with new hires who have full unfair dismissal protection, a probation process that exists on paper but not in practice, and managers who have no idea the clock has changed.
The jobs market is softer right now. Candidate supply is high, particularly for operational and generalist roles. The temptation to hire quickly and figure it out later is understandable. But the cost of a bad hire — now compounded by the January change — is higher than it's ever been. Getting the hire right and managing the first six months well are the same problem.
The Employment Rights Act has landed. The Fair Work Agency is open. And the NHS dispute is a reminder — expensive and ongoing — of what happens when the relationship between an employer and its people quietly deteriorates over years without anyone addressing it directly.
The businesses in the strongest position right now aren't the ones who spent last month in a compliance panic. They're the ones who've always treated their people function as a commercial priority — clear pay structures, honest conversations, and managers who are equipped to handle difficult situations before they become costly ones.
That posture doesn't require a large HR team. It requires intention — and sometimes a little outside support.
A fast, practical picture of where you stand — what's in order, what needs attention, and what can wait. No alarm, no jargon. Just a clear view.
Practical sessions covering the ERA changes and the situations your line managers are most likely to face — absence, family leave, performance, redundancy. Built around your business.
If either is useful, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly what you need.
Agency Bulletin
The people issues that matter to UK business owners, cut through. No noise. No jargon.
UK employment law changed this week. Not in a distant, theoretical way — in a practical, affects-your-payroll-and-your-contracts way.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 has moved from legislation to reality, and the enforcement body that backs it up is now open. The good news is that most of what's changed is straightforward to get right. The Fair Work Agency isn't going to be at your door this week. Enforcement builds over time, and it focuses first on the most obvious failures — unpaid minimum wage, miscalculated holiday pay, absent records. Businesses that act methodically over the coming weeks will be fine.
What this week's bulletin covers: what's actually changed, what it means in practice, and where to focus first.
Every Employee Now Qualifies for Sick Pay From Day One
Statutory Sick Pay is now payable from the first day of illness. The three-day waiting period has gone. The lower earnings limit — which previously excluded lower-paid and part-time workers — has been removed entirely.
SSP is now calculated at 80% of average weekly earnings or the flat rate of £123.25 per week, whichever is lower. Every employee on your payroll, regardless of their hours or pay, qualifies from day one of any absence.
If you have lean teams in sectors with higher absence rates — hospitality, retail, care, logistics — the financial impact is worth modelling now. Short absences that previously cost you nothing in SSP will now trigger a payment from the first day.
Paternity Leave Is Now a Right From the First Day of Employment
The 26-week qualifying period for paternity leave is gone. So is the one-year qualifying period for unpaid parental leave. Both are now day-one rights — meaning a new starter can request them immediately.
It's worth being clear on what has and hasn't changed: paternity leave is now a day-one right, but statutory paternity pay still requires 26 weeks' continuous service. The leave entitlement and the pay entitlement operate differently.
Most employment contracts still reference the old qualifying periods. If yours do, they are now non-compliant. This applies to contracts, staff handbooks, onboarding documentation and any family leave policy you operate.
The Cost of Getting Redundancy Consultation Wrong Has Doubled
The maximum protective award for failing to properly consult on collective redundancies has increased from 90 days' gross pay to 180 days' gross pay per affected employee. This applies to dismissals taking effect from 6 April 2026.
To be clear: the consultation process itself hasn't changed. What's changed is the financial consequence of not following it. Collective redundancy rules are triggered when you propose 20 or more redundancies at one establishment within 90 days — and the obligation to consult is substantial.
Employees don't need two years' service to claim a protective award. That makes this a risk even for relatively new workforce changes. If restructuring is anywhere on your 2026 agenda, the doubling of this penalty is material.
Keeping Holiday Pay Records Is Now a Legal Requirement
This is the change that's had the least coverage — and it matters. From 6 April 2026, all employers must keep adequate records of statutory annual leave and holiday pay. The duty applies to every employer, every worker type, and every sector.
Records must cover ordinary and additional annual leave, any leave carried forward, holiday pay calculations, and payments made in lieu of leave. They must be kept for six years. There's no prescribed format — but they must be clear, accurate and retrievable.
Non-compliance is a criminal offence, carrying potentially unlimited fines. And there's a practical risk beyond the legal one: holiday pay has been a growing source of tribunal claims for years. Without adequate records, you have no defence.
The Fair Work Agency Is Open. It Doesn't Need a Complaint to Investigate You.
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026. It brings together enforcement of National Minimum Wage, Statutory Sick Pay, holiday pay and agency worker protections under a single body with significantly enhanced powers.
The critical difference from what came before: the Fair Work Agency can investigate proactively, without an employee complaint. It can enter premises, inspect records, investigate breaches going back up to six years, and issue penalties of up to 200% of underpayments — capped at £20,000 per worker. It can also bring tribunal claims on behalf of workers and name non-compliant employers publicly.
That said, enforcement builds gradually. The Agency's early focus will be on clear-cut failures: NMW underpayments, missing holiday records, miscalculated holiday pay. Businesses making good-faith progress on compliance are not its primary target. But businesses with obvious gaps should not assume they're invisible.
Anyone You Hire From July Gets Unfair Dismissal Rights After 6 Months
This one isn't live yet — but the clock is already running. The reduction in the unfair dismissal qualifying period from two years to six months takes effect on 1 January 2027. Anyone employed from 1 July 2026 onwards will reach that threshold on New Year's Day.
This changes how you hire, how you onboard, and how you run probation. The informal "we'll see how it goes" approach to the first year of employment stops working in July. From then, every new hire needs a documented probation process — clear expectations, regular check-ins, evidenced feedback — completed within six months.
The businesses quietly preparing for this now are redesigning their probation frameworks, updating offer letters and onboarding, and training line managers to have early, constructive conversations.
The Employment Rights Act 2025 is now law. That's not a reason to panic — it's a reason to get organised.
The businesses that will handle this well aren't the ones who scrambled before a deadline. They're the ones who treat it calmly and methodically: updated documents, briefed managers, payroll that reflects the new reality. Most of what needs doing is genuinely straightforward once you know what you're looking at.
The Fair Work Agency is proactive, but it's also new. Its early focus will be on the most clear-cut failures — NMW underpayments, missing holiday records, uncorrected SSP calculations. If you're broadly compliant and making good-faith progress on the rest, you're in a reasonable position.
If you're not sure where you stand, that's exactly the conversation we're built for. A fast, honest audit — what needs doing, what doesn't, what can wait. No alarm, no jargon. Just a clear picture.