The articles summarised below are accessible with a free subscription to HR Daily.

Employees might be unlikely to dispute stand-down directions at the moment but claims and legal challenges are set to emerge when the market recovers, Henry William Lawyers director and executive lawyer Nick Noonan says. "Employees can lodge a dispute with the Fair Work Commission about a stand-down direction, but my view is that an employee could separately make a claim that it's a breach of the Fair Work Act and the consequence of that breach would be that they're entitled to payment."

...

Leaders who think they are communicating with employees in more detail and with more frequency due to COVID-19 might still be under-doing it, says Qualtrics APJ's head of growth and strategy, Steve Bennetts. Feedback suggests employees want communication every day.

...

The rules that will determine how the national JobKeeper scheme operates have been released. Also in this article, employees have been feeling more anxious and stressed since the COVID-19 outbreak and mental health claims have been increasing; employees are generally positive about their employers' COVID-19 responses; and more.

Premium content

The below articles are accessible with HR Daily Premium membership.

A taskforce and response teams, weekly roundtables and revamped communication strategies are helping General Mills respond quickly to COVID-19 disruptions, ANZ HR director Victoria Street says. She provides a look inside the workplace safety and engagement measures the organisation has implemented for its mix of on-site and remote employees.

...

Warning remote workers to be "as productive as possible" will only exacerbate the challenges associated with COVID-19, while maintaining standard, predictable working hours and compensation for overtime will help alleviate them, Centre for Future Work researchers Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford say. They stress the importance of "providing home workers with appropriate support and protections, and preventing abuse and exploitation", both because of the current pandemic and because many of the arrangements it has prompted will outlast it.

...

An employer did not take unlawful adverse action against a worker when it terminated his contract after he criticised a client in the media, an appeal has affirmed.