The notice period an employer tried to skip ended up setting the size of the bill
An employer ended a worker's resignation notice early. The Fair Work Commission's Full Bench has now raised her compensation to the full amount.
The decision, issued on August 14, 2026, involved a worker who had spent about five years with Bytewize Pty Ltd, a company supplying specialist ICT technician services to Victorian Government schools under the Technical Support to Schools Program.
On October 7, 2025, after an exchange with the company's director about her timesheets, she emailed her resignation. A second email that evening went to the director and to a range of email addresses of people employed in the Victorian Department of Education and Training. In it she offered to work until November 14, 2025 “so as to limit the impact to my schools.”
The director replied the next morning. He wrote that the email was “not only extremely disappointing but this conduct completely unacceptable” and said the company would be “standing you down effective immediately.” A separation certificate later recorded her employment as ceasing on October 9, 2025.
At first instance, a Deputy President did not accept that she had simply been stood down. The employment agreement contained no stand down clause, and the circumstances did not enliven the stand down power in section 524 of the Fair Work Act. He found the company had ended the employment at its own initiative on October 8, 2025, and that the dismissal was unfair.
He accepted that circulating the resignation email so widely was unnecessary and a potential source of embarrassment to the company and its commercial interests. But it did not rise to the level of a valid reason for dismissal.
Reinstatement was not appropriate. On May 21, 2026, he ordered compensation of $4,406.05 gross.
That figure came from a subtraction. He assessed that the employment would have continued another five and a half weeks - to November 14, 2025 - worth $9,974.19 including superannuation. From that he deducted $5,568.14, covering earnings from a part time role the worker began on March 3, 2026 at $25.30 gross per hour for a 15.5 hour week, plus income likely to be earned before compensation was paid.
Both sides appealed.
The company was allowed extra time to file, but the Full Bench refused it permission to appeal, finding no arguable error. It restated a principle applied in many Commission decisions: where an employee gives actual notice of resignation, an employer's unilateral decision to end the employment during that notice period is a termination on the employer's initiative. The contract required 30 calendar days' written notice, but as the Full Bench put it, that clause “does not prohibit a longer period of notice.” An employee who gives longer notice sets a later end date, and the employment runs until it expires.
The worker's appeal succeeded. The Full Bench granted permission on public interest grounds, finding her point raised an important question about how compensation is assessed. Only money earned during the period the employment was assessed to have continued is deducted. She was unemployed for that entire five and a half weeks and received no income from work in it. Earnings she obtained months later did not reduce a loss she had already suffered.
The company was ordered to pay an additional $5,568.14 gross, less tax, on or before August 28, 2026. The Full Bench said it should have been ordered to pay the full $9,974.19 the Deputy President had calculated.
For HR teams, the operating rule is narrow and easy to get wrong. A resignation that offers more notice than the contract requires still fixes the end date. Walking someone out before that date turns a voluntary exit into a dismissal - and the compensation is measured against the notice the employee actually offered, not the shorter period the contract would have allowed.
