Most of a casual academic’s work doesn’t happen inside a classroom.
It happens in preparation time, marking, student consultations, assessment design, and the many academic activities that sit around scheduled teaching. For universities, this creates one of the most complex payroll and compliance environments in any industry.
In 2025, Fair Work scrutiny has made it clear that approximation and manual workarounds are no longer defensible when it comes to Award and Enterprise Agreement compliance. This is especially true in higher education, where payment rules are closely tied to academic activities rather than simple hours worked.
One of the most significant risk areas in this landscape is the way flexible, planned but unscheduled work is applied to casual academics.
What are repeat activity payments in Higher Education?
Most Australian university Enterprise Agreements include requirements that recognise the additional preparation required when a casual academic teaches for the first time in a week.
A typical rule looks like this: the first tutorial delivered in a week includes a preparation component. Subsequent tutorials in the same week do not.
The intent is clear. Academics should be paid for the time it takes to prepare to teach but not repeatedly paid for the same preparation across multiple similar classes.
On paper, this is a simple rule. In practice, it is one of the most common causes of underpayments, disputes, and compliance risk across the higher education sector.
Why repeat activity payments can be difficult to administer
The complexity does not come from the Enterprise Agreement itself. It comes from how academic work is actually performed.
Casual academics may teach multiple classes across different days, work across multiple schools or campuses, deliver tutorials, complete marking, or prepare for lectures in variable ways and times.
When this happens, many organisations lose a reliable view of:
- Which tutorial was the first for the week
- Whether preparation time has already been paid
- Whether preparation is being accidentally paid more than once
So, universities are left relying on manual claims, academic self-reporting, and payroll interpretation after the fact. This is where compliance gaps emerge. The more fragmented the data, the more difficult it becomes to capture out of schedule work or activity payments.
Workforce compliance: the underlying issue is workforce visibility
Most universities understand their Enterprise Agreement obligations. The real problem is visibility into how academic work is planned and performed as it can be highly variable:
- Teaching
- Preparation
- Marking
- Student engagement
- Exam supervision
- Intensives and block delivery
When these activities are captured retrospectively, entered manually, or split across multiple systems, accuracy becomes dependent on individual judgement rather than system control.
And that’s where inconsistency, dispute, and Fair Work exposure begins.
How workforce management solution change the equation
nimbus works with Australian universities to move compliance from after-the-fact payroll correction to workforce-driven compliance. This means using a modern workforce management solution at the point where work in planned, scheduled, and approved.
This approach connects three critical capabilities:
- Scheduling: where academic work is planned and allocated
- Award and EBA compliance: where rules such as repeat and unscheduled, ad-hoc activities are applied
- Time and attendance/transactions: where both scheduled and unscheduled work is captured and approved before payroll
When these modules operate together, unscheduled academic work and repeat activity payments stop being a payroll problem and become a scheduling outcome.
Here are four ways universities are improving work/activity compliance
1. Applying repeat activity rules at the scheduling stage
Rather than relying on payroll to reconstruct what happened, universities are embedding repeat activity logic directly into their scheduling and rostering systems.
This allows the system to:
- Identify the first tutorial for the week
- Automatically include preparation time once
- Exclude preparation from subsequent tutorials
- Prevent double-counting before work occurs
By aligning scheduling with compliance rules, universities ensure that what gets rostered is already compliant before it reaches payroll.
2. Capturing casual work as it happens
Integrated time and attendance allow universities to capture sessional academic work as it is performed, not weeks later. This includes teaching, preparation, marking, and student support practices. These activities are planned, have defined workloads, carry Award/EBA rule, and need to be paid correctly.
When work is captured at source, entitlements can be calculated from actual activity, there is a single version of the truth, and disputes and rework are significantly reduced.
This gives payroll accurate, defensible data rather than estimates.
3. Embedding Awards and EBAs into daily operations
Instead of treating Enterprise Agreements as an after work payroll interpretation mechanism, leading universities embed them directly into their workforce systems.
This ensures:
- Planned unscheduled activities are captured and paid correctly
- Repeat activity rules are applied automatically
- Prep time is included correctly
- Thresholds and triggers are enforced
- Exceptions are flagged immediately
The system won’t allow non-compliant schedules to be created in the first place.
4. Finding issues before payroll, not after
The biggest shift we’re seeing across the sector is that universities want to identify compliance issues before work happens, not six months later during an audit.
By giving HR, faculty, and workforce teams real-time visibility of casual allocations, teaching loads, preparation entitlements, and cross-campus assignments, issues can be corrected before they become payroll risks.
This is what workforce and compliance maturity looks like in practice.
What this means for Higher Education institutions
Accurately capturing academic work, including repeat activity payments isn’t just about paying people correctly (though that matters). It directly impacts:
- Fair Work exposure
- Protecting institutional reputation
- Giving casual academics confidence that their work is being recognised fairly
- And giving leadership a defensible compliance position
When compliance is enforced at the point of scheduling, it becomes a natural outcome of how work is organised and not a risk in back-pay remediation.
Learn more about nimbus for Higher Education
nimbus works with Australian universities to manage the complexity of casual academic scheduling, workload, and compliance through purpose-built technology for higher education.
If critical compliance and scheduling practices like flexible work patterns, repeat activity payments, preparation time, and variable academic work is causing operational difficulties, explore how nimbus supports higher education.
Start a conversation with our team to understand how governance can be applied in your environment.
