Fixed term Contract

[bullswool]

Hi,

I have a question about employee going from permanent full time to a fixed term FT contract. Can this be done?

Currently, employee is permanent full time member of our staff, has been for 3 years. Good employee, no issues.
We have an opening for a 9 month fixed term FT maternity leave replacement position. He wants to take the fixed term role. There will not be an opportunity for him to move back to previous role at end of the fixed term.

Can we even contract such a situation? Can anyone reference some laws, articles, documents etc?

My worry is that after the 9 months, we'll say "Thanks, 9 months is over" contract is terminated. Payout leave entitlements, and on your way. Then there might be an issue of not being able to reduce a permanent FT employee to a fixed term role in the first place.

And then we have problems...

[Moz]

In some respect it's like someone making an internal transfer to a position that ends up becoming redundant. There's always a risk, except in this case he knows up front that it's fixed term.

From a legal perspective you will have employed him continuously for 3 years and 9 months, so you will have to pay any entitlements, which may include redundancy. Obviously you wouldn't have to do this if you just brought a new person in for 9 months. Other than that I can't see a problem with it, so long as he knows it's a fixed term and he also knows you will back-fill his position so he won't be able to go back to that.

Why don't you backfill his job with a contractor on a fixed term, so he could then go back to his old job?

[Tiger]

Why don't you backfill his job with a contractor on a fixed term, so he could then go back to his old job?

Very good idea from Moz. In several corporates in past years I've seen good employees taken out of their normal job and seconded to a special project - usually IT. Problem with IT projects is they rarely come in on time or on budget and there can be a huge amount of stress associated with that particularly is there is an idiot running the show (one I vividly recall). What happened is a timeline of 18 months blew out to 3 yrs and it still wasn't finished; there had been restructures during the Project and in some cases, the previous jobs, of those seconded project men and women, no longer existed. Also, because of the wear and tear and emotional roller coaster of the project (long hours, lots of travel to the west and too much time away from families), by the time I was asked to run a health check, company was about to lose several really good employees.
Of course, there was no guarantee, they might not have left under normal circumstances, but general consensus was that they were lost due to that particular project.
The lesson? Be sure your employee in question knows what he is getting into and if you really don 't want to lose him make sure you find a way to have something worthwhile available after the secondment. Otherwise, if you can't do that and he's happy to move into something knowing it has a time limit and after that he is out the door, it is his choice! Just be sure to capture what is offered and agreed, in writing so no misunderstandings later.
Tiger