LAST year when I wrote about Online Dispute Resolution it seemed way off. However, today a number of disciplinary hearings have been conducted online due to Covid-19 and this is likely to be the norm into the future.

Employers and workers have no choice but to embrace online discipline handling as long as Covid-19 continues to claim lives. Lawyers, consultants and trade unionists would not want to risk their lives attending live hearings. Organisations as well would not want to risk contamination by outsiders they do not know.

Principles of natural justice require a fair hearing and one of the cardinal requirements is a right to representation by a representative of one’s choice who can be an outsider.

The outsider can either bring Covid-19 into the workplace or can be affected by Covid-19 if the workplace is contaminated.

To have people in voluntary self-isolation prior to a hearing is unrealistic and costly and thus online discipline handling is the answer.

All this means we have to embrace technology and conduct hearings online and move the related paperwork online.

This has been done successfully in the EU countries for years and CCMA in South Africa is fast catching up. We should remember that things like conveyancing, divorce and trade disputes are dealt with online in many countries and as such there is nothing special about labour dispute resolution.

Obviously the first question will be whether the courts will accept such hearings. While no case has gone to court, my reading of the law is that as long as the process passes the fairness test, there is nothing illegal.

Online hearings are even better because the record of proceedings is on real-time and can be retrieved in the form of video or voice recognition software can be used to produce a typed version.

There is, however, a need to ensure all who participate have the necessary tools to engage fairly in the process.

These include having the appropriate gadget such as a desktop, laptop, tablet or cellphone. There must also be good network capable of lasting the hearing among many others.

All this now takes managerial employees back to training together with members of the workers committee if the process is to be done simply and properly.

Workers too have to be trained so as to ensure fairness.

They will obviously be litigation against online discipline handling for reasons such as its unfair because you did not meet or workers can collapse the hearings arguing the internet went off or the gadget ran out of battery and many others.

All these are manageable problems.

In conclusion, organisations have to adopt the online discipline handling system in order to maintain discipline while observing Covid-19 rules.

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: Email: [email protected]