Employment Hero launches automated infrastructure to address admin strains

According to the employment platform, compliance pressures and resulting decreases in business confidence are fuelling some worrying trends.

HeroForce, which launches today (22 April) is a new model designed to centralise and automate employment administration.

To navigate complex regulation requirements, Australian businesses are shelling out $160 billion annually – and according to Employment Hero, attempts to tackle compliance processes manually and independently are driving down productivity and costing up to a quarter of an employee’s salary.

Despite the estimated $12.6 billion wasted in duplicate admin, hundreds of thousands remain underpaid, and over half of audited businesses still do not meet regulatory standards.

In response, Employment Hero has combined end-to-end employment infrastructure with its HeroAI agent to centralise and manage these complexities. Described as an evolution of co-employment models, this will lift the pressure of managing payroll, compliance and HR administration while allowing businesses to retain operational control.

According to Employment Hero CEO and co-founder Ben Thompson, HeroForce will help Australian businesses overcome the structural barriers within the national system, where past models were unworkable.

“Most businesses aren’t failing at compliance because they’re careless or dishonest,” he said.

“They’re struggling because individual employers are trying to solve an extremely specialised regulatory problem while also running a business. The system has become too complex to manage manually.”

Australia’s current employment framework includes more than 120 modern awards with specific classifications, pay conditions and compliance requirements – and regulation is only getting tighter. With wage theft now a criminal offence, and reforms such as Payday Super soon coming into effect, certain trends are emerging in response to the economic landscape, during an already tumultuous national productivity crisis.

According to Employment Hero, 59 per cent of Australian organisations see reducing operational costs as their primary challenge – understandable given a shifting labour market where almost half of businesses are struggling to attract and retain talent.

Casual employment has surged 9.3 per cent year on year, while full-time hirings stagnate.

In addition, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that independent contractors make up 7.5 per cent of the workforce, signalling a greater focus on flexibility in an increasingly demanding and dynamic compliance landscape.

Thompson said: “Running a business in Australia increasingly means becoming an expert in payroll, modern awards, Fair Work compliance and superannuation.”

AI, he said, is the key to relieving some of this responsibility.

The aforementioned HeroAI interprets modern awards, develops rosters, automates payroll calculations and monitors compliance, which, according to Thompson, “fundamentally changes the economics of employment administration”.

He said: “By removing the friction that prevents employment, employment becomes cheaper and simpler and as decades of historical evidence tell us, businesses will employ more people to build more, serve more, expand into new areas.”

“Every hour reclaimed from repetitive administration is an hour redirected to work that actually grows economies.”

According to Employment Hero, analysis of professional employer organisations (PEOs) in the US equipped with this technology found double the growth rate, 12 per cent less employee turnover, and a 50 per cent lower likelihood of going out of business.

It is a model that, according to Thompson, doesn’t just benefit businesses.

He said: “The last financial year saw 250,000 Australian workers underpaid, despite the huge investment in compliance. Of the businesses the Fair Work Ombudsman investigated, 56 per cent were found to be non-compliant. For years, I’ve seen businesses try and navigate the system to fall short due to its complexity rather than deliberate wrongdoing.”

“These issues are frequently the result of fragmented compliance systems rather than bad intent.”

HeroForce operates autonomously and within Australia’s regulatory framework, ensuring employees are engaged under formal contracts and are fully protected under the Fair Work Act with all relevant benefits.

It is available in Australia as of today.