Fair Work Commission

The AWRS surveyed enterprises in the national jurisdiction of workplace relations with 5 or more employees.

Information about the scope of the AWRS can be found in the Technical notes.

Table 2.1 displays the key characteristics of the enterprises that participated in the AWRS that were used as the basis of the sample design.

Source: AWRS 2014, Enterprise Characteristics (Recruitment screener) survey.

As highlighted in Table 1.1, there were varying completion rates for each of the employer questionnaire components. The figures in Table 2.1 reflect the sample composition for the enterprises that completed at least 1 employer questionnaire component, namely the Employee Relations questionnaire.

The AWRS data presented in the First Findings report have been weighted so that it aligns with the population counts for each industry division by the 3 employment size categories.

Table 2.2 depicts the weighted and unweighted counts for each of the industry divisions and the 3 employment size categories.

Information about how the AWRS weights were constructed is available in the Technical notes.

Source: AWRS 2014, Enterprise Characteristics (Recruitment screener) survey.

Employment size information will be available for a range of size categories when data is released, including the ABS standard business size ranges and other ranges that will facilitate comparative analysis to key data sources.

In addition to the number of employees reported by enterprises upon recruitment to the AWRS, which has then been categorised into employment size ranges (the ABS standard classifications for business size has been used throughout the First Findings report), the AWRS dataset also includes 2 full-time equivalent (FTE) measures that have been derived from the number of paid hours worked by all employees of the enterprise over a defined reference period in February 2014.

These 2 measures take account of the number of paid hours worked by employees of the enterprise divided by either 35 hours (ABS definition) or 38 hours (modern award definition) over the reference period to generate the number of full-time equivalent employees/positions that the number of paid hours worked equates to. This measure can give additional context to employment size figures, particularly the operations of enterprises that have high proportions of part-time staff over the reference period.

As demonstrated in Table 2.3, the FTE number of employees is generally lower than the actual reported number of employees as the head count number of employees includes employees that work part-time. However, where enterprises had employees work more than the standard full-time hours (including overtime) during the reference period, this would increase the FTE measure.

Source: AWRS 2014, Workforce Profile survey and Enterprise Characteristics (Recruitment screener) survey.

Base = 946 enterprises that completed the online version of the Workforce Profile survey and were able to provide an estimate of total paid hours.

Note: Number of employees and FTE data items may not be available in the confidentialised unit records. Derived variables that aggregate these data, such as ABS size categories or ratios would be available in this case.