Fair Work Commission

Introduction

The Fair Work Commission is determined to continue to improve our services to the Australian community. Our work has changed significantly in recent years. With fewer regular clients, most parties are now first time participants in the Commission processes and legislation, and are often self-represented.

What's Next: the Fair Work Commission's plan to improve access and reduce complexity for users initiative (PDF) sets out changes we will make to our services. At the centre of this initiative will be our users – employees, employers and their representatives, and other members of the Australian community.

What's Next is a continuation of the Commission's Future Directions program, a reform program to improve access to justice, promote efficiency, increase accountability and engage with industry. 

Key initiatives

Key initiatives include:

• providing additional support to self-represented users, particularly during the early stages of dismissal cases
• launching a new case management system to make it easier for all users (both first-time and frequent) to manage their cases online
• partnering with behavioural insights experts
• significantly improving access to free legal advice through the expansion of our Workplace Advice Service
• developing short summaries of key modern awards, and
• reducing agreement processing times.

Behavioural insights initiative

The Fair Work Commission has published the outcomes of its first behavioural insights project, led by the Behavioural Insights Team.

The report Promoting compliance through behavioural insights (PDF) looks at how behavioural insights techniques could be applied to reduce costs and barriers to access for employers and employees who use the Commission’s services, and improve overall compliance with unfair dismissal and enterprise agreement lodgment requirements.

Behavioural insights – also known as ‘nudge theory’ – draws on cognitive science, psychology and behavioural economics to understand the unconscious biases and motivations that influence how people think, make decisions and behave, with a goal to help people make timely and informed decisions.

The report makes several recommendations regarding how we may start to apply behavioural insights to our processes, particularly in unfair dismissal and enterprise agreement contexts. We have begun implementing a number of initiatives to improve our processes and the information we provide to the public, and will continue working to implement other recommendations in the report over the coming months.