Every business needs the best experts on the job when negotiating an enterprise agreement. Australian Business Lawyers & Advisors can train your team or work side-by-side.
As one of Australia's leading enterprise bargaining advocates, Nigel Ward has been at the forefront of modern negotiations since the late 1980s. This indepth experience has given him a holistic understanding of workplace strategy, bargaining tactics and the law.
Australian Business Lawyers & Advisors provide multiple solutions in working with your business to ensure the bargaining process achieves the desired outcomes, in line with long-term growth and strategy.
Key insights on bargaining strategy:
- Don’t rush into bargaining if you have not started. You need a material business reason to start.
- Don’t assume bargaining will improve your workplace culture. There are much better ways to do this.
- Consider your broader labour sourcing strategy before you start bargaining, maybe the flexibility you need can come from the mix of sourcing.
- If you are bargaining try not to industrialise things you need to keep fluid, such as safety and policies.
- Learn how to map your workplace culture and union relations to understand what bargaining environment you are likely to be in and then plan how to evolve this to not undermine your workplace culture.
- Understand how you teach your employees to behave in bargaining by your actions. If strike action leads to better outcomes you are teaching your employees to go on strike!
- Try and achieve the longest agreement length you can get to give yourself time to work on your direct engagement strategies outside of bargaining.
- Understand that your objective must be to move bargaining to a relational basis where you and your employees place your on-going relationship ahead of any transactional bargaining gain.
Call for a confidential discussion about your enterprise bargaining needs on 1300 565 846.