HR, safety and compliance for the construction industry

The Building and Construction General On-site Award has more than twenty individual allowances, and four cause most of the damage.

Tool allowances are trade-specific. Electrical, plumbing and carpentry each have their own rate. A single generic rate across trades is one of the most common triggers for Fair Work Ombudsman scrutiny.

Leading hand allowances are based on the number of workers someone actually supervises, not their job title. Miss the trigger, miss the entitlement.

Travel time between sites or from a depot is payable – the kilometre rate alone isn’t enough. This is one of the most persistent sources of underpayment in the sector.

Overtime and penalty rates for early starts, late finishes, and Saturday work are frequently miscalculated, and the exposure compounds quickly across a full crew.

Our HR advisors review your pay arrangements against BCGOA obligations, identify exposure and get your systems compliant. The advice line is available 24/7, with no call limits.

The short answer: the contract doesn’t decide — the working relationship does.

Since the 2024 independent contracting reforms to the Fair Work Act 2009, employment status is determined by the totality of how the relationship  works. An ABN and an invoice are not sufficient protection.

Factors that point toward employment include:

• you control how and when the work is done;
• the worker works predominantly for your business;
• you supply the tools and equipment;
• they can’t subdelegate the work;
• and they carry no genuine financial risk.

A sham contracting finding creates liability for all unpaid Award entitlements from the start of the relationship – wages, leave, super, allowances – plus significant civil penalties under the Fair Work Act for each contravention.

If you haven’t reviewed your arrangements since the 2024 reforms, a Citation Group HR Compliance Audit will tell you where you stand before it becomes a claim.

Under the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, a principal contractor’s WHS Management Plan must cover:

• who is responsible for WHS on the project;
• how WHS is being managed across all subcontractors on site;
• site safety rules;
• incident and emergency procedures;
• and how workers are informed of their obligations.

It must be prepared before work starts, kept accessible on site throughout the project, and updated whenever anything changes that affects those arrangements.

On top of the plan, a Safe Work Method Statement is required for every high-risk construction work activity before it commences – work at heights over two metres, excavation deeper than 1.5 metres, demolition, work near power lines and others.

One thing regulators make clear: the plan has to reflect what happens on site. A document that sits in a folder and doesn’t match practice won’t hold up under a WorkSafe or SafeWork inspection. Our construction WHS consultants build systems that do.

Yes, and for many contracts, it’s no longer a differentiator. It’s a requirement.

ISO 9001 (quality management) demonstrates to procurement panels that your processes for quality control, documentation and project delivery are structured and independently verified. ISO 45001 (safety management) carries significant weight in construction tenders where WHS performance is a scored criterion.

ISO 14001 (environmental management) is the one that’s catching businesses off guard. Government infrastructure projects, urban development approvals and environmental impact assessments are increasingly referencing it as evidence of systematic environmental risk management, covering site contamination, waste, stormwater runoff and material sourcing. Not holding it is becoming a visible gap in tender submissions.

All three support the ISO construction codes and standards referenced in federal and state procurement frameworks across infrastructure, defence, health and education projects.

Citation Group manages the full ISO certification journey across all three standards. First-time certification typically takes three to six months, so it’s worth starting well before a tender deadline.

The best construction payroll software is one built for Award complexity from the ground up.

Construction payroll involves variable hours, project-based work, BCGOA allowances that change by trade and duties, and time data captured across multiple sites. Systems that require manual Award interpretation or re-entry between timesheets and payroll create the conditions for underpayment.

foundU, Citation Group’s workforce management platform, handles this natively. Rostering, a mobile construction timesheet app and Award-interpreting payroll sit in one platform. BCGOA allowances, overtime and penalty rates are calculated automatically from approved timesheet data, removing the manual handoff where errors typically occur.

It also supports job costing and project-based reporting, licence and white card tracking, multi-site rules and Single Touch Payroll (STP2) compliance.