Case Study
The ultimate compliance challenge
How we reinvented a university’s casual engagement process – fast.
The Problem
The university’s ability to deliver its programs depended on hiring over 1,000 casual academics each year - but new casual employment laws exposed the university to serious compliance risks.
Non-compliance wasn’t an option, and the clock was ticking. With just 11 weeks to design and implement a legally compliant solution, the HR Services team had to pivot fast.
The challenge? Transform a complex, high-risk process into a streamlined, compliant system - without disrupting teaching operations.
Our Approach
We partnered with HR Services in an initial 3-week Discovery phase to define business requirements, assess gaps in current processes and technology, and establish a minimum viable product (MVP) scope for a compliant casual academic contracting process.
With this foundation, we launched an 8-week MVP phase to design, build, and implement the essential people, process, and technology components.
Working closely with university experts, we focused on delivery of key workstreams: offer and onboarding process, casual work assignment process, change management, and business-as-usual transition.
The Solution
The university’s casual hiring process needed more than a quick fix. The new employment laws required a fundamental rethink of the systems and processes for casual academic engagement from recruitment to payroll.
Starting with the university’s existing talent pool model using the Acendre platform, we built out a new casual work offer and onboarding processes to enable successful candidates to accept engagement as casual academics but without a specific work assignment.
We also replaced the existing ad-hoc casual academic contract process with a new roster-based system built on top of the university’s Academic Workload planning tool, so that the university could manage casual academic staffing requirements and casual academics could log in, review their assigned shifts, and accept or decline work offers - one shift at a time, fully aligning with the legal definition of casual employment.
Making this work required automation. We integrated the Academic Workload Tool with Aurion, the university’s HR system, so that when casual academics accepted rostered work offers, the accepted shift information was automatically posted to Aurion enabling casual staff to be paid using the existing myHR pay claim process.
Problem Solved
In just 11 weeks we not only completed the technology development and implemented a new process that was compliant with the new federal legislation, we actually delivered a process that was a lot more efficient than the existing process with far less manual effort required from the HR Services team.
The new process also gives both the faculties and colleges and the casual academics more flexibility.
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