The Department of Labour has created, and continues to create, a number of online tools designed to aid employees, employers, businesses and potential migrants navigate some of the more commonly raised issues and concerns about working and living in New Zealand.

Holidays Online Tool

The Holidays Online Tool provides guidance on whether an employee is entitled to a paid public holiday, sick day or bereavement leave day (that is, whether the day would "otherwise be a working day" for an employee) and what an employee should be paid (that is, their "relevant daily pay" for their day off or for working on a public holiday).

Ask a Question Tools

The ‘Ask a Question’ tools provide answers to a wide range of frequently asked questions on health and safety, employment relations and immigration issues. Every time you search, you'll access databases that have answers to more than 100,000 common questions that other people have asked before.

• Health & Safety
• Employment Relations
• Immigration

Workplace Productivity Snapshot

The Workplace Productivity Snapshot is designed for the owners/managers of small to medium businesses. It will show how you can improve the productivity of your business but does not provide a 'scientific' analysis of your business's performance.

Individual Employment Agreement Builder

Anyone employed after 2 October 2000 must have a written employment agreement, whether it’s an individual agreement or a collective agreement. The Individual Employment Agreement Builder provides examples of clauses drawn from existing employment agreements, indicates clauses legally required in all agreements, and offers a range of clauses to meet any additional needs of your workplace. Once you have identified the clauses you wish to include in your employment agreement, you are able to assemble the clauses into one draft agreement.

Parental Leave Entitlements

To make the process of receiving parental leave as easy as possible, we have created five simple online question and answer calculators. Four of these lead birth mothers and partners considering applying for leave, through the process of calculating their entitlement. The fifth assists employers in calculating their employee's entitlement.

At the end of the exercise, entitlement details are provided, together with an explanation of the process for applying for parental leave and the statutory parental leave payment.

1. Birth mothers - employees
2. Birth mothers - self-employed
3. Partners - employees
4. Partners - self-employed
5. Employers: work out your employee's parental leave entitlement

Letters of Employment builder

This tool has examples of covering letters that employers can customise for sending out an offer of employment. There are three types of letters and the correct one an employer should use depends on whether there is a relevant collective agreement in place that covers the type of work the employee will perform and whether or not the successful applicant is a member of a union that is a party to that collective agreement.

1. Example 1: Letter offering employment where there is no relevant collective agreement in place.
2. Example 2: Letter offering employment where there is a relevant collective agreement and the successful applicant is a member of a union that is a party to that collective agreement.
3. Example 3: Letter offering employment where there is a relevant collective agreement but the successful applicant is not a member of a union that is a party to that agreement.