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I want to talk very quickly about enterprise agreements and how you might deal with an enterprise agreement should your organization or should another organization that you work with or consult to has one. So I think the first thing to understand, so most enterprise agreements are for three or four years in duration, some are less. And the most important thing is that when you’ve got an agreement that’s expiring. Don’t wait. Most enterprise agreements, or a lot of enterprise agreements will be negotiated with unions, because unions either have members in the workplace, or they were the ones that originally sought the enterprise agreement to be negotiated in the first place.

So the best thing to do is if you’ve got an enterprise agreement, is to have to make sure you’re doing early planning, make sure six to eight months before your expiry, you’re planning for the upcoming enterprise agreement. So a lack of planning puts your organization in reaction mode, weakens the negotiated the negotiation position. And the thing to be doing in the early planning in particular is consider Okay, what is good about this currently EBA that we’ve got? What do we want to maintain? And what are we not happy with?

And, and there’s nothing wrong with going into an enterprise agreement negotiation, as a company representative wanting something out of it. Many organizations, when they enterprise will deal with enterprise agreements, they just think, well, it’s all about what the union and employees want, and asked for. And it’s just a case of, you know, dealing with all of those claims. That’s not how an enterprise agreement has to work

An enterprise agreement can very well be, you want these things in this enterprise agreement, we want these things in this enterprise agreement, bearing in mind that once you’ve got one enterprise agreement in place, it can be very, very hard to get certain conditions out of it in future agreements. So that’s always the challenge is that once you’ve agreed to an enterprise agreement once, that’s gonna form a very strong basis for future enterprise agreements. And really what you’re talking about changing is the kind of the five to 10%ers in the agreement, you’re not going to completely rip the agreement off and start again, that that’s just unrealistic thinking.

And that’s probably the biggest takeaway, I’d say, for everyone out today that if you’re in an enterprise agreement, and it’s not working that well, well, then you might have to change it over a long period of time.

So consider what changes could be sought. Remember, everything’s not possible, consider what competitors might be doing. Anticipate what the union might be doing as well. And how you might anticipate what the union might be doing is, again, talking with the competitors sharing information about, you know, claims, if you’ve got that relationship with your competitors. Consider your communication strategy with employees. So there is certain there is certain compliance obligations, you must notify employees, that they have what’s called a notice of employee representational rights so that they have the right to be represented in an enterprise agreement negotiation. It’s a formal Fair Work Commission document that is issued, and then start considering your new agreements skeleton. So if it’s the first time you’ve done an enterprise agreement, you can work on something from scratch, which might be based on the Modern Award with some changes. Or alternatively, if it’s your old agreement, or then look at your old agreement, OK, what’s the skeleton of it from the new agreement and tweak the areas that you would like to see change. So that’s the sort of stage one which is the early planning.