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.

Applying behavioural insights

Behavioural insights (BI) is a key part of our ongoing strategy to reduce regulatory burden and complexity for our users.

BI draws on research from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioural economics to explain and predict how people make decisions and behave.

We have published the outcomes from two projects exploring the application of BI at the Commission.

Improving compliance & timeliness of employers responding to an unfair dismissal application

This work focused on compliance in the unfair dismissal jurisdiction, which is the Commission’s largest source of applications.

We conducted a trial to see if BI could improve compliance and timeliness among respondents providing their employer response to an unfair dismissal application. We designed and tested 4 behaviourally informed versions of the service letter sent to respondents: plain language, call-to-action, social norm, and a checklist.

Download the report: Improving compliance and timeliness of employers responding to an unfair dismissal application (PDF) (published March 2021)

Promoting compliance through behavioural insights

We looked at how BI 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. This project was led by the Behavioural Insights Team.

Download the report: Promoting compliance through behavioural insights (PDF) (published March 2020)