Startup Idea: Union Grievance Management Software

Startup idea to develop a user-friendly, online software to manage and analyze union grievances better. The concept involves creating an easily accessible platform that would assist HR departments in keeping track of grievance sources, types, solutions and respective outcomes. This would substitute current inefficient practices like excel sheets and improve interdepartmental cohesion and knowledge sharing. Key aspects would be report generation, trend analysis and strict confidentiality.

I work in union management relations on the HR side. Our organizations wants to do a better job of keeping track of what kind of grievances we're getting (e.g. what grievances are about (e.g. overtime, employee discipline), where grievances are coming from, what kinds of offers we've made the settle the grievance, when the grievance is resolved (e.g. a settlement right after the grievance is filed, an arbitration order) and what it took to resolve it. Right now, we keep track of this in Excel and a lot of people don't update their documents at all, or with useful information (in large part because Excel is a TERRIBLE tool for this task). This information is also not shared amongst different departments

As a result, the organization doesn't get the information it needs, and people working in union-management relations don't get the information they need. This is also a big problem because if there are a lot of grievances about an issue (such as overtime), it may mean that we are not following the collective agreement, we may have inconsistent practices, we may want to create an HR policy to fix the problem, or we may want to try to re-negotiate the collective agreement language in the next round of negotiations. Online software that is very simple to use and can be used from any work computer would be EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY helpful in my organization. Even if it was a simple online system where people could type in this sort of information, and you could pull information to generate reports, would help a great deal. It would help people working in different parts of my department have a better idea of what's going on, and help stop expensive problems quickly (e.g. if management is not following the collective agreement process for assigning overtime, it means HR people are wasting a lot of time and money without addressing the root of the problem). As an individual, no. However, I think organizations would pay for this sort of software. It's really tricky to keep track of grievances. Some people think it's not worthwhile to do so (the union may be filing a lot of grievances because they are protesting something or are misinterpreting the collective agreement.. or they could be filing a lot of grievances because there is a big problem we need to fix). Software that could analyze grievance trends would be very helpful for public sector employers (in Canada, I think something like 70% of the public sector is unionized) and private sector unionized employers.

One big issue would be confidentiality. It would be important to maintain the integrity of the system. For example, we wouldn't want the union or employees to be able to hack into the system.