The golden rules for employee breaks in the workplace

Did you know that rest and meal breaks are essential for improving productivity, culture-building, and safety in the workplace? Ensuring that your employees can rest, relax, and refresh will help foster better decision-making, problem-solving, and efficiency, as well as reducing risk, and minimising potential harm, and mistakes. Breaks can be an avenue for teams to develop stronger relationships and trust as they spend time together that’s not purely work-related.

For all the benefits of breaks, it’s not always easy to incorporate them into the workplace. Factors like business continuity, health and safety considerations, the operational environment, resources and, of course, the interest of your employees can make “taking a break” a lot more complicated.

Employers should, however, be aware that the law now outlines minimum requirements for breaks to be taken at prescribed times that can’t be varied without good reason.

In this article, we’ll run you through the current legal requirements and suggest three steps you can take to eliminate the risk of breaching the standards for breaks in the workplace.

Rest, meal breaks, and the Law

A break at work is a period (paid or unpaid) where an employee can step away from the job to refuel, recharge, and re-energize. The requirements for breaks at work are a relatively recent addition to New Zealand law, having been introduced to the Employment Relations Amendment Act 2000 on 1 April 2009.

In the years since the right of all workers to reasonable rest and meal breaks became a statutory requirement, the law has been amended twice: once in 2014 and again in 2019.

How could these rules affect your business?

The provisions around breaks will affect most workplaces because almost all have workers who need to rest and eat during their day.

Employees who aren’t receiving their break entitlements under the current law have the right to take their complaint to their employer, and to Employment NZ (or their Union if they are a union member) if they feel their complaint warrants escalation. Where the complaint requires the intervention of a Labour Inspectorate (unlikely, but it happens) then you could face penalties for failing to meet break entitlements.

What are the rest and meal break standards?

There are two kinds of rest breaks in NZ law, and this doesn’t change. They are:

1. paid shorter rest breaks that can be taken mid-morning and mid-afternoon; and
2. the unpaid longer meal break.

The latest changes passed by the government are intended to protect workers’ rights to rest by prescribing a minimum requirement for the time and duration of rest. This overturns the previous law which only specified that if an agreement on breaks wasn’t reached, the employer could determine a reasonable break time and duration or compensate the worker instead.

The following chart sets out the minimum break requirements under the 2019 guidelines:

Rest and meal breaks from 6 May 2019

How strict are the regulations around breaks?

You can agree with your employees on something different to the minimum break requirements that I’ve outlined in the chart (for example 15-minute paid rest breaks instead of 10-minute or 60-minute unpaid meal breaks instead of 30-minute), but if you don’t agree then these are the default timings and periods as a matter of minimum employment entitlement.

There are some exceptions. If you’re engaged in national security delivery or emergency services, where continuity is critical, you may agree with your employees to take breaks differently. In a situation where you can’t agree then you must compensate the affected employees for the lack of breaks with either alternative time off, financial payments, or both.

Remember that compensation for an employee will only be allowed instead of a break if there is a valid exemption and the requirements for compensation instead of a break are met. You can contact us at Citation HR if you need clarification of these exemptions.

Three steps to an effective break culture

There are three important things you can do to ensure that your organisation is meeting the current standards for breaks at work:

1. Update existing employment agreements

Consider updating your existing employees’ employment agreements so that they comply with the rest and meal break requirements.

2. Policies must reflect the law

If you have a company break policy, this will need to be updated to ensure your guidelines match the current law.

3. Building positive workplace culture and well-being

Consider working with your HR team or outsourced HR partner to build a culture of self-regulation and self-care when it comes to taking breaks at your workplace. This is a particularly valuable process if you have a workforce where employees work remotely or are engaged in high-risk, fatigue-inducing activities, such as long-haul driving. Even in an office environment, where it can seem relatively simple to enforce breaks, it’s still beneficial to ensure that your workers are genuinely taking the rest they need.

If you can get your business to take these three steps, you’re well on your way to having a compliant and effective break culture in your workplace. Ensuring your workers are taking adequate breaks will also have the added benefit of enhancing team productivity, innovation, and drive.

As a science writer, Ferris Jabr summarises beautifully,

Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to both achieve our highest levels of performance.

If this article has raised any questions or concerns, or you’d like to learn more about how we can help your business, please contact our team of workplace relations specialists.