Most advice on employee feedback quietly assumes one thing: that your team turns up Monday to Friday, sits at a desk with a work email address, and reads its inbox between nine and five. If you run a small business in Australia, you already know how wrong that assumption is. A big slice of your workforce probably works irregular shifts, has no guaranteed hours, and never logs into a company email account at all.
I have managed sales teams in electrical wholesale and run a tool retail business through a hard turnaround. In both, the people closest to the problems were often the ones with the least predictable schedules. The casual on the trade counter on a Saturday morning sees things the Monday-to-Friday crew never will. The part-timer who only works the school-hours shift notices the gap in the handover that the full-timers have learned to ignore. If your feedback program does not reach those people, you are not gathering quieter feedback. You are gathering biased feedback, weighted towards the staff who happen to be in the room when you ask.
This article is about fixing that. Not the legal side of casual employment, which is well covered elsewhere, but the practical design problem: how do you actually run surveys, check-ins and pulse polls when a chunk of your team has no fixed roster?
Why casual and part-time staff get left out
The exclusion is rarely deliberate. It is structural, and it shows up in three predictable ways.
First, timing. If you send a survey on a Tuesday at 9am because that is when you happen to be at your desk, you have just missed the casual who only works Thursday nights and the part-timer who finished at lunchtime. By the time they are back on shift, the survey is buried, the deadline has passed, or they have simply forgotten it existed.
Second, anonymity. In a small team this is a genuine fear, not a hypothetical one. If you have five casuals and three respond, anyone reading the results can often work out who said what. Casual staff feel this more sharply than permanent staff because they have less protection if their honesty is read as disloyalty. Research and practitioner guidance on anonymous surveys consistently stresses that perceived anonymity drives honest answers, and that small samples are where that perception breaks down fastest SurveyMonkey (2024).
Third, entitlement. A lot of casual workers simply do not feel they have a right to a voice. They were hired for flexibility, often think of the job as temporary even when it is not, and assume the “real” decisions are made by the permanent crew. Left alone, that assumption hardens into silence.
The irony is that these are frequently the people best placed to spot operational problems, precisely because they move between shifts, sites and tasks and have not yet been trained by routine to stop noticing.
Fix the timing first
The single highest-return change is to stop relying on work email and stop sending at office-hours convenience.
Use a channel casuals actually carry: their phone. An SMS link, or a tool that works cleanly on mobile without a login wall, will reach a casual workforce far better than an email to an address they never check. Keep the survey itself short enough to finish on a phone while waiting for a coffee.
Then send it when your casuals are actually on the clock, or close to it. In hospitality that might mean a Sunday evening or a Friday afternoon. In retail or trade it might mean catching the Saturday crew. The point is to match the send to the roster, not to your calendar. If your casuals cluster around particular shifts, send around those shifts.
One more thing on timing that matters for fairness: do not ask casual staff to engage outside paid hours. Expecting unpaid survey time from people you employ casually is both a bad look and, increasingly, a sensitive area as casual entitlements tighten under recent law. Build the feedback moment into a paid shift wherever you can.
Get the anonymity thresholds right
In a team of five, true anonymity is close to impossible, and pretending otherwise destroys trust the first time someone feels exposed. Be honest about this with your staff and design around it.
A few practical rules help. Set a minimum response count before you ever share segment-level results. If fewer than five casuals respond, do not publish “what the casuals said” as a separate slice. Instead, group responses across a longer window, say a fortnight, so the pool is larger, or merge the casual and part-time pools together so no single small group can be picked out. Tools built for small teams should let you configure these thresholds rather than forcing you to eyeball it. Guidance on anonymous survey controls makes the same point: the controls only work if they are set to the size of your team, not to enterprise defaults CultureMonkey (2024).
When I was rebuilding the business at Total Tools Brendale, where we took an internal audit score from 35% to 95% over two years, the early honest feedback only came once people believed it would not be traced back and used against them. You do not earn that belief with a privacy policy. You earn it by visibly protecting people the first few times they speak up.
Keep the questions short and present-tense
Annual engagement surveys are built for a stable workforce that can reflect on “the past twelve months”. A casual who worked twelve shifts spread unevenly across the year cannot answer that question meaningfully, and the data you get back is noise.
Short-form pulse questions work far better for irregular workers. Two or three questions, focused on the recent and the concrete, beat a forty-question annual instrument every time. Ask about the shift, the week, the specific process, not the abstract year. If you want to compare pulse and annual approaches for a small team in more depth, I have written about that trade-off separately on the Business Review 360 blog, but the short version is simple: little and often, kept relevant to what the person actually experienced.
Not every check-in has to be digital
For small teams with in-person shifts, the lowest-friction feedback channel is often a person, not a portal. A structured end-of-shift question, asked verbally by the manager and logged into a shared tool afterwards, captures casual feedback without asking the casual to do anything outside their paid time.
It can be as plain as: “What slowed you down today, and what would you change if it were your call?” The discipline is in the logging. If the manager writes it into a shared system every time, you build a record you can act on and spot patterns across shifts. If it stays in the manager’s head, it dies there. This is also exactly the kind of low-overhead consultation the Fair Work Ombudsman points to in its best-practice guidance on workplace consultation: regular, genuine, two-way, and not buried in formality Fair Work Ombudsman (2024).
The compliance angle makes this more important, not less
The Closing Loopholes legislation changed the definition of casual employment and the pathways to permanent work in Australia. Some workers you currently treat as casual may now have a clearer route to conversion, and the assessment of who is genuinely casual has shifted Fair Work Ombudsman (2024). Legal commentators have spelled out what this means for employers in practice, from updated obligations to the casual employment information statement Sprintlaw (2024), and HR practitioners have flagged that the changes raise the stakes on getting casual arrangements right Subscribe-HR (2024).
I am not a lawyer, and you should check your own obligations against the source material rather than my summary. The operational point is this: the legal trend is towards treating casual workers as a more permanent, more protected part of your workforce. That makes hearing from them and acting on what they say more important, not a nice-to-have you can skip because “they’re only casual”.
Closing the loop matters most for the people with the least security
Here is the part most businesses get wrong. They collect feedback and then go quiet. For permanent staff that is frustrating. For casual staff it is fatal to participation, because they already suspect their voice does not count, and silence confirms it.
If a casual tells you the Saturday handover is broken and three weeks later nothing has changed and nobody has explained why, they will not bother next time. But if you fix the handover and say, on shift, “we changed this because someone on the Saturday crew flagged it”, you have just shown the whole team that casual input moves things. That is what makes the next survey worth answering.
Closing the loop does not require a big announcement. A line at the start of a shift, a note on the staffroom whiteboard, a short message to the group. The medium does not matter. The proof does.
Where Business Review 360 fits
I built Business Review 360 because I kept watching good ideas from the front line get lost, often the ideas from the people with the least structured way to share them. The platform is designed to collect feedback across every staff type, including workers without a fixed roster or a work email address. Its anonymity controls and configurable response thresholds are built for small-team conditions, where a handful of casual responses could otherwise identify someone. If you want honest input from your whole workforce and not just the Monday-to-Friday core, that is the gap it is meant to close. You can take a look at businessreview360.au.
Casual and part-time staff are not a hard-to-reach edge case. In a lot of Australian small businesses they are most of the team. Build your feedback program around how they actually work, and you stop guessing about the parts of your business you never see.
References
Fair Work Ombudsman. (2024). Casual employment changes. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/workplace-laws/legislation-changes/closing-loopholes/casual-employment-changes
Fair Work Ombudsman. (2024). Consultation and cooperation in the workplace best practice guide. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/best-practice-guides/consultation-and-cooperation-in-the-workplace
CultureMonkey. (2024). Anonymous employee survey controls guide. https://www.culturemonkey.io/employee-engagement/anonymous-employee-survey-controls/
SurveyMonkey. (2024). Anonymous employee surveys: Tips, best practices, and templates. https://www.surveymonkey.com/learn/employee-feedback/anonymous-employee-surveys/
Sprintlaw. (2024). New casual employment laws in Australia: What employers must do now. https://sprintlaw.com.au/articles/new-casual-employment-laws-in-australia-what-employers-must-do-now/
Subscribe-HR. (2024). A guide to casual employment changes for Australian HR managers. https://www.subscribe-hr.com.au/blog/casual-employment-changes
FAQ
How often should I survey casual and part-time staff?
Little and often beats once a year. For irregular workers, a short pulse of two or three questions tied to a recent shift gives you usable answers, while an annual survey asking them to reflect on the past twelve months mostly produces noise. Aim for a light, regular rhythm and always run it during paid hours.
How do I keep responses anonymous when I only have a few casuals?
Set a minimum response count before you share any segment-level results, and never publish “what the casuals said” as a separate slice if only two or three replied. Group responses across a longer window such as a fortnight, or merge your casual and part-time pools, so no individual can be identified by elimination. Be honest with your team that perfect anonymity is impossible in a small group, and protect people visibly the first few times they speak up.
Do the new casual employment laws mean I need to change how I gather feedback?
The Closing Loopholes changes updated the definition of casual work and the pathways to permanent employment, so check your own obligations against the Fair Work Ombudsman material. The practical effect is that casual workers are being treated as a more permanent, more protected part of the workforce, which makes capturing and acting on their feedback more important, not less.
What if my casual staff do not have a work email address?
Do not rely on email at all. Use SMS or a tool that works on mobile without a login wall, and send it when those staff are actually on shift. For in-person teams, a structured end-of-shift question asked by the manager and logged into a shared tool captures honest feedback without asking anyone to engage outside paid hours.
How do I get casuals to believe their feedback actually matters?
Close the loop, visibly and quickly. When something changes because of front-line input, say so on shift or on the staffroom board and credit the source group rather than the individual. Casual staff start out assuming their voice does not count, so the only thing that overturns that is seeing their input move something real.