Rostering a night cleaning crew without burning people out

A night roster is not a list of names against buildings. It is a promise that a specified amount of work will be done after the occupants leave, by people who still have to get home, sleep, and come back. Most commercial cleaning in Australia is delivered on that promise. Most of the grief in the industry is also delivered there: a shift that looked tidy at 4pm, a second site added in the van, a supervisor covering two suburbs, and a cleaner who has not had two consecutive days off in a fortnight.

This piece sits in the operations and workforce hub because the roster is where the Cleaning Services Award, the WHS duty on fatigue, and the contract hours you sold all meet. If those three documents disagree, the cleaner pays first and the client pays later. It is not legal advice. Read the current award, the Fair Work Ombudsman’s pay tools, and your state WHS regulator before you lock a pattern in.

What the award actually pays for night work

The Cleaning Services Award 2020 (MA000022) does not treat “nights” as one loading. Clause 20 sets penalty rates for specified times and days. A Monday-to-Friday shift that starts before 6.00 am or finishes after 6.00 pm — other than a public holiday — is paid at 115 per cent of the minimum hourly rate for a full-time employee, 130 per cent for a part-time employee (that figure already includes the part-time allowance), and 140 per cent for a casual (already including casual loading). Those percentages apply to the entire ordinary-hour shift, not only the hours after 6pm.

A higher band applies to a shift that finishes after midnight and no later than 8.00 am, does not rotate or alternate with another shift or with day work, and is not a public holiday. That permanent-night rate is 130 per cent for full-time and part-time employees and 155 per cent for casuals, for all hours worked. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s explainer on shift penalty rates in the Cleaning Award is the plain-English version of the same table.

Weekend hours do not sit on top of those shift penalties. Hours from midnight Friday to midnight Saturday, and from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday, take the weekend percentages in Table 7. Public holidays take the public-holiday percentages. A cleaner who starts at 10pm Saturday and finishes at 4am Sunday is on Saturday rates until midnight and Sunday rates after it, even if they are otherwise a permanent night worker. That is why a weekend cover plan that “just uses the night crew” is a costing decision, not a favour.

Part-time employees under this award also receive a 15 per cent part-time allowance on ordinary hours. The award is explicit about why: it lets you roster a part-timer up to 7.6 hours a day, five days a week, or 38 ordinary hours, without overtime. The allowance does not apply to permanent night work — Fair Work’s shift-penalty note says so — which is why a part-time night pattern and a rotating afternoon pattern do not cost the same even at the same classification.

Do not quote last year’s hourly rate from memory and call it current. The Fair Work Commission varies the dollar figures, usually from the first full pay period on or after 1 July. Use the Pay and Conditions Tool and the current pay guide. The percentages are the stable part of the argument; the dollars move.

Fatigue is a WHS problem before it is a payroll problem

Safe Work Australia’s guidance on managing fatigue risks is not an award clause, and it is not optional colour. A person conducting a business or undertaking still has to manage fatigue as a health and safety risk, in consultation with workers and any health and safety representative. The published control examples are blunt enough for a night-cleaning business: limit shift length; allow at least 12 hours to recover between shifts; limit consecutive workdays; keep patterns as regular as possible; avoid last-minute changes; and, if night work is necessary, limit consecutive night shifts to three, avoid safety-critical work between 2am and 6am, and give as much notice as you can so people can move their sleep.

The award’s minimum break between shifts is shorter than that WHS guidance. Clause 14.4 requires eight consecutive hours between the end of one ordinary-hour shift (including overtime hung on the end) and the start of the next. If you require someone to start without that break, you pay overtime rates until they are released for eight hours. That is a penalty for a breach of rest, not a licence to roster it. A pattern of 1am finishes and 7am school jobs, or a night building plus an early commercial strip, is how you manufacture both a payroll underpayment and a foreseeable incident on a wet stair.

Night cleaning is full of safety-critical work in the hours Safe Work asks you to treat carefully: ride-on scrubbers on concourses, chemical decanting, ladder work in foyers, lone work in car parks, and driving between sites after a six-hour physical shift. If the only way the contract works is a cleaner making those decisions at 4am on their fifth consecutive night, the control is not another toolbox talk. It is a shorter block of nights, a paid break, a second person on the machine, or a price that buys a bigger crew.

Build the fatigue rule into the roster software, not the toolbox talk. Cap consecutive nights. Cap two-site runs that leave less than 12 hours before the next start. Treat second jobs as a fatigue input — Safe Work says to have a policy — rather than pretending the cleaner who does mornings for another contractor is fully recovered because your timesheet is clean.

Travel between sites is working time

Clause 17.12 of the award is short and widely ignored. If the employer requires an employee to travel from one workplace to another, the time spent travelling is paid at the rate applicable at that time as if they were working, and the employer pays the fares. A cleaner who finishes a suburban medical suite at 9.30pm and is told to start a second office at 10pm is not on a free intermission. They are on the clock.

Vehicle allowance is a separate clause. If, by agreement, the employee uses their own car or motorcycle in performing their duties, the kilometre rates in clause 17.11 apply. Those dollar figures are varied with the award. Do not invent a flat “travel fee” that undercuts the clause and call it industry practice.

The operational test is simple. Map the night as the cleaner lives it: lock-up at site A, walk to the car, drive, access at site B, set out, clean, pack down. If that sequence only fits because travel is unpaid and the second site is “just a quick one”, you have not rostered a night. You have hidden labour. The same honesty belongs in the tender. A cluster of small suites can be efficient if they sit on one corridor of a campus. The same square metres spread across a city, with after-hours dock waits and security escorts, is a different job. Price the kilometres and the waiting, or you will steal them from sleep.

Broken shifts are a defined thing, not a vibe

A broken shift under clause 17.2 is a rostered shift on one day in two periods of duty, excluding meal and rest breaks, within a maximum spread of 13 hours, with more than an hour between the periods. It attracts a daily broken-shift allowance, capped weekly — again, check the current dollar figure. Fair Work’s note on broken shifts in the Cleaning Award adds the part that wrecks a cheap split: if a shift penalty applies to any part of the broken shift, that penalty applies to all ordinary hours in both periods, because they count as one shift. The allowance is paid as well.

That is why a 6am school block and a 6pm office, sold as two tidy little jobs, can become a 13-hour spread with a night-shift penalty on the morning as well. It may still be a legitimate pattern. It is not a discount pattern. If the break between periods is used so the cleaner can hold a second job, you have also just imported someone else’s fatigue into your WHS file.

Do not invent a third period and call it flexibility. The award definition is two periods. A cleaner bouncing between a morning school, a lunchtime food court and a night tower is not on a clever roster. They are on a cost that has not been written down.

24/7 buildings are not “the same job after dark”

A hospital ward, an airport, a hotel, a data hall or a 24-hour supermarket is occupied. The specification still talks about square metres. The work is sequencing around people, noise limits, infection or food rules, and a client who will walk through the area at 3am. You cannot copy a 6pm–10pm office roster onto that building and add a penalty rate.

Roster for the building’s clock, not yours. Day-clean in public areas, night-clean in back of house, a defined overlap with the in-house team, and a named supervisor who is awake and reachable for the hours you sold. Lone-work rules belong here: check-in times, a duress arrangement, and a second person for tasks that are unsafe alone. The 30-day induction should have already tested whether this person can hold a radio, an access card and a chemical on a live floor. If they cannot, they should not be on the Sunday graveyard because you are short.

Hospitals and aged care will also have their own colour-coding, isolation and PPE rules. A night cleaner who learned “blue cloth for everything” in a suburban office is a cross-contamination incident waiting for the next outbreak. Do not use the 24/7 site as the training ground. Use it as the exam.

Weekend cover is a second roster

Saturday and Sunday are not leftover Monday. The award’s weekend percentages are material — 150 and 200 per cent of the minimum hourly rate for a full-time employee on Saturday and Sunday ordinary hours, with higher inclusive figures for part-time and casual — and they apply instead of the weekday shift penalties. Public holidays sit higher again.

If the contract includes weekend work, write a weekend roster with named people, not a hope that the night crew will “pick up Saturday”. Fatigue compounds when Friday night becomes Saturday afternoon becomes Sunday night. The two consecutive full days off in each seven-day cycle (clause 13.7) are not a suggestion. A crew that is useful because they never say no is a crew you will replace.

The operational answer is a defined weekend team, a casual pool used for the purposes the award actually allows, and a communication tree that does not rely on one supervisor’s mobile. That is the same system described in managing absenteeism and weekend cover. If you have not built it, you do not have weekend cover. You have a prayer and an underpayment risk.

Supervisor ratios, leading hands and the person who is actually in charge

The award does not prescribe a magic number of cleaners per supervisor. It does classify the work. A Cleaning Services Employee Level 2 may carry out leading-hand duties, with the leading-hand allowance in clause 17.7. A Level 3 is the building supervisor or manager who coordinates leading hands, deals with tenants, and handles routine personnel and WHS matters. Paying someone Level 1 and calling them “the senior” on a radio is a classification problem, not a compliment.

The operational ratio is about span of control at 2am, not about the allowance table. One leading hand who can walk a single tower, check chemical, and cover a no-show is a ratio. One person “supervising” eight sites across a city from a car is a dispatcher. If the second person cannot get to a site before the shift ends, they are not supervising it. They are hoping.

Write the night with a named person accountable for each building, a second name who can take the radio, and a maximum number of sites one mobile supervisor will accept. When a client audit asks who was in charge last Tuesday, the answer should be a person, a classification and a timesheet, not “the office”.

That accountability is also why subcontracting versus employing cannot be a roster trick. A string of ABN cleaners who only exist on your night sheet, wear your shirt, and cannot send a substitute, will be assessed as employees by Fair Work and the ATO regardless of what the roster app calls them. If you need surge labour, use a licensed labour-hire arrangement where the state requires it, or employ casuals for the purposes clause 11.1 actually lists.

How a roster is supposed to be made

Clause 13 is not exciting and it is the whole job. Full-time ordinary hours average 38 a week, organised as five days of 7.6 hours, a four-week cycle with rostered days off, 19 days of eight hours a month, or up to ten hours on agreed days. Part-time and casual ordinary hours are up to 7.6 a day and up to five days a week. Minimum engagement on a shift is set by the size of the cleaning area: one hour only in a narrow small-site exception, then two, three or four consecutive hours as the floor area grows. You pay the minimum even if the work is shorter.

At engagement you must tell the employee their type of employment, usual work location and classification, and record it. Part-time hours, days and start/finish times are a written agreement, varied in writing. The roster for full-time and part-time employees shows names and start and finish times, is posted where they can see it, and changes by agreement or with seven days’ notice — shorter in an emergency. A change is recorded in the time and wages records. Consultation on regular roster or hours changes sits in clause 28.

The Fair Work Act also gives employees a right to disconnect: unless it is unreasonable, they may refuse to monitor or respond to contact outside working hours. A culture of “just check the group chat at 4pm on your day off” is now a legal argument as well as a fatigue one. Put genuine emergencies on a paid on-call arrangement if you need them. Do not run the business through unpaid vigilance.

None of this prevents a contractor from running a tight night book. It prevents you from calling a scramble a system. The firms that keep people are the ones who publish the roster early, pay the travel, rotate nights before the fourth one, and treat a 24/7 building as a specialised crew rather than a punishment posting. Quality inspections the next morning will show the difference; so will workers compensation claims that start with a fall at the end of a double. We would rather the inspection than the claim.

If a pattern only works when nobody gets sick, nobody has a car that fails, and nobody reads the award, it is not a roster. It is a bet. Write it again, or walk away from the hours you cannot staff. That is the same standard we apply to the rest of this journal; the method is in the editorial standards.