What does an HR health check include?
An HR health check is a fixed-fee review of your employment paperwork and the processes you actually use, ending in a written report that tells you what to fix and in what order. It's the cheapest way to find out where you stand before something forces the issue.
What gets reviewed
Award coverage and classifications
Which modern award applies to each role, and what classification level each person sits at. This is where most of the money is. Classification decisions made casually years ago tend to quietly set the wrong base rate for everything that follows: penalties, loadings, overtime and leave all calculate off it.
Employment contracts
Whether your contracts match the actual job, the actual hours and the actual award. Whether they cover the things that matter when a relationship ends: notice, probation, confidentiality, and what happens to accrued entitlements. Whether casual employees have been engaged in a way that matches how they actually work.
Policies
Not a library. The handful you genuinely need, and whether anyone could follow them. Most small businesses have either no policies or forty that nobody has read. Both cause the same problem in a dispute: no evidence of a standard that was communicated.
The processes you actually use
Recruitment and onboarding. Probation, and whether anyone reviews it before it lapses. How performance concerns get raised. How complaints get handled. How people leave. This is usually the gap: paperwork is easier to buy than process.
Record keeping and pay administration
Whether time and pay records meet Fair Work record-keeping requirements, whether payslips carry what they must, and whether anyone is checking pay against the award when rates change each July.
What you get at the end
A written report in plain English, not a compliance matrix. For each issue: what it is, what the practical exposure is, and what to do about it, ranked so you can work down the list rather than stare at it.
A short list of what's already fine. This matters more than people expect. Most owners assume everything is broken, and a lot of it usually isn't.
A conversation to walk through it, so you can ask the obvious follow-up question without opening a new engagement.
How long it takes and what it costs
The TendHR HR Health Check is a fixed fee from $1,800 and takes ten business days. You'll know the price before it starts.
Your side of it is usually an hour or two: sending through contracts, a recent payslip or two, any policies you have, and answering questions about how things actually work day to day.
What it isn't
It's an HR review, not a legal opinion. Where something needs a lawyer, you'll be told plainly rather than sold an answer.
It isn't an audit that gets sent to anyone. Nobody is notified. There's no report to a regulator, and nothing about a review creates an obligation you didn't already have.
It isn't a pile of templates. Documents without a process just relocate the problem.
What usually turns up
In most reviews of small Australian businesses, the same handful of things surface: a classification that doesn't match the work being done, contracts that don't reflect the hours people actually work, casual arrangements that have quietly become permanent in practice, probation periods that lapsed without anyone noticing, and no written record of performance conversations that everyone remembers having.
None of these are unusual. All of them are cheaper to fix on a quiet Tuesday than in the middle of a claim.
Who it's for
Businesses without an internal HR manager, usually somewhere between five and fifty staff. It's particularly worth doing before you grow quickly, before you sell, after you've inherited a team through an acquisition, or after a near miss that made you realise you weren't sure of the answer.
Working with TendHR
I'm Emily. Seventeen years in HR: operational HR, senior People and Culture leadership in public and community sector organisations and now advisory work with small and medium businesses across Australia. I work by phone and Teams.
If something is already happening, say so when you get in touch. Urgent matters start with a short paid triage session rather than a review, so the immediate problem gets dealt with first.
Not sure where your business sits? The HR Health Check is a fixed-fee review that tells you what to fix and in what order.
This guide is general information, not legal advice, and doesn't take your specific circumstances into account. TendHR is not a law firm.