How Online Voting Can Streamline The Enterprise Agreement Approval Process
April 1, 2020
An enterprise agreement is an agreement between employer and their employees, it contains terms and conditions of employment, including wages for a period of up to 4 years from the date of approval. These agreements are negotiated by the parties through collective bargaining in good faith, especially at the enterprise level.
Under the Fair Work Act 2009, an enterprise can mean any kind of business, activity, project or undertaking. The Fair Work Act sets out requirements for bargaining for a proposed enterprise agreement.
In able to reach an enterprise agreement between businesses and their employees, they will still have to vote. Utilising an electronic voting system can make it seamless, secure, and beneficial for all parties (the employer, employee and the Unions).
How can a secure online voting platform help companies streamline the approval of their enterprise agreement:
Effectively communicate with your workforce
Often a successful vote on your agreement is based on your communication plan prior to voting. Whether it is is a pre-vote survey, information guides and explanations about the agreement clauses or even just ensuring that everybody employee knows when the agreement is being voted on is important to disseminate to your workforce prior to voting opening. Vero Pulse can help you with the distribution and execution of your communication plan.
Saves time for faster approval process
A manual show of hands, in-person voting ballot box voting or postal voting systems can take weeks or months to organise. From manual printing of voting material, delivery to voters, collecting data, monitoring to processing tally and even ensuring the availability or all voters and when they can assemble to vote. It also needs extra manpower to complete the voting activity. Time is precious for every business, and using an online voting platform can streamline the process with efficiency.
Vero online voting platform can be customised to suit your business needs. Our Enterprise Agreement voting system is secured and proven to bring higher responses from your workforce. With our streamlined voting process, they can cast their votes using their mobile devices easily.
If the vote successfully returns a majority Yes, the report generated is formatted ready for submission to Fairwork.
Secures employee privacy
Electronic voting systems are secure and allow employees to vote in confidence and in private. This allows them to feel more secure about their opinions and their submissions remain anonymous. Similar to secure online banking, the voting process is encrypted and uses advanced technology to simulate ballot box voting where your anonymity is protected at all times.
Cost Savings
By having better communication, gathering feedback during the bargaining and having a simplification of the voting process using online methods all helps to reduce cost, improve compliance and aids employees in achieving a good understanding of the newly proposed agreement. This can improve the chances of returning a positive result when you go to vote the first time, which in turn can speed up the time it takes to submit your agreement to Fairwork and ultimately getting agreement accepted.
Delivers highly-accurate results
With an electronic voting process, it is highly accurate, with instant counting, auditable and allows a result returned almost immediately after the close of the voting process. The final report in most cases is generated 15 minutes allowing you (if successful), to finalise very quickly your submission to Fairwork.
Our enterprise agreement voting system helps simplify, secure, and fast-track the process of reaching a mutually beneficial solution between the business and its workforce. It also gives you more time to focus on your core communication plan and responsibilities in managing the agreement based on FWC standards, which in turn allows you to streamline your entire enterprise agreement approval process from bargaining through to submission to FWC.
