Company agreements have recently been given primacy over other agreements that may be concluded at higher levels, and sometimes even over the law.
This primacy comes into play in many areas, three of which seem particularly interesting for negotiation in your company.
The main advantage of company negotiation is that it enables you to adapt the law to your company’s real needs.
With the primacy of company agreements, you can, for example, put in place within your company a specific mechanism for organizing working hours, adapted to variations in your company’s activity.
It is therefore important to seize this opportunity and negotiate directly within your company, especially as company negotiations are open in particularly important areas, in which we invite you to enter into negotiations, whatever your workforce and whether or not employee representatives are present in your company.
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Company negotiations on the organization of working hours
If there is no industry-wide agreement on the organization of working hours in your sector, you can sign a company-wide agreement that sets out the terms and conditions of such an arrangement.
If a branch agreement already exists, the company agreement can replace it with guarantees that are at least equivalent, but it will take precedence over the branch agreement. We’ll just have to be more careful when drafting it.
This can take several forms:
– It can vary the working week between high and low periods and organize compensation between these periods in the form of rest days;
– These agreements may limit weekly working hours;
– These mechanisms are particularly useful for organizing and smoothing the counting of overtime: a reference period is determined, and a limit of hours is set. Time worked in excess of this limit will constitute overtime, and must be settled as such.
Example: for an annual arrangement of working hours, this limit is set at 1607 hours.
The total number of hours worked by the employee should be calculated, and any overtime worked in excess of the maximum weekly limit set by the agreement and already recorded (paid or recovered during the year) should be deducted. The remaining hours in excess of this limit will be paid to the employee at the end of the reference period.
This system allows overtime to be recorded over a given period rather than every week, so that overtime payments can be adapted to variations in company activity.
If an employee works a lot of hours in a given week, but less in the following week, the average overtime hours will result in less or no overtime being recorded.
This means you can arrange your working hours to suit your needs or the pace of your business, regardless of the number of employees working in your company.
If you are faced with highly variable working periods, we strongly recommend that you make use of this possibility and negotiate working time arrangements within your company.
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Company negotiations on compensation
You can also decide to set up specific bonuses within your company, which can also be set up through a company agreement.
While these bonuses can also be set up through a unilateral commitment on your part, setting them up through negotiation allows you to obtain the agreement of employees or their representatives, and also to discuss the concrete implementation of this bonus, its calculation and payment procedures.
Adopting this bonus system by means of an agreement means that employees are involved in determining the terms and conditions of this bonus, and more generally feel integrated into the decision-making process relating to the company’s development, and increase their motivation to participate in the company’s evolution.
Various bonuses can be set up in this way: target bonus, productivity bonus, seniority bonus, etc.
Here again, the introduction of bonus payments by company agreement enables you to adapt the law to your company’s real needs.
For example, if you want to build loyalty among your employees, you could decide to set up a seniority bonus to be paid from the second year of effective presence within your company, and thus motivate your employees to stay with your company for the whole of this period and even beyond.
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Negotiations on the organization of work in your company
You can also use company-level negotiations to organize specific working arrangements tailored to your business.
At company level, for example, you can adopt an agreement on telecommuting within your company.
In this area, too, the company agreement takes precedence over any agreement concluded above it.
In this agreement, you can set out the conditions under which your employees can telework, and the operating procedures for this special organization.
It will also be necessary to strictly define the terms and conditions for calculating working time for employees teleworking.
Here again, it’s a good idea to be able to implement work organization methods adapted to your company, such as telecommuting, rather than having unsuitable standards imposed by the legislator or social partners at branch level.
Company-level negotiations are of vital importance, especially for smaller companies.
It enables you to tailor the law to your needs and requirements, and avoids having inappropriate standards imposed on you in relation to your workforce, for example, or in relation to the specific conditions of your business or the working methods you have implemented within your company.
Although company agreements take precedence in many areas, we must remain vigilant with regard to the articulation of standards in labor law, which remains a complex subject to grasp.
We strongly recommend that you use this leverage within your company, with the support you need to deal with the particularities of employment law.
Naturally, DESRUMAUX AVOCATS is at your disposal to help you implement negotiations within your company.
