Workplace Mediation

To view a typical workplace mediation, click here.

Conflict in the workplace is inevitable. In just about any work setting, people with different personalities, goals, and values are bound to encounter situations where they will ‘clash’.

The effects of such clashes, especially if poorly managed, are well known:

• relationships that have taken months and years to build can be spoiled in a day
• other employees can get drawn into the conflict on one side or another
• formal grievance and disciplinary processes can take over the situation, leaving the disputants feeling sidelined and disempowered
• the time and effort of managers, human resources personnel, colleagues, trades union officers, solicitors and others are all consumed by their efforts to address the conflict
• although the situation might eventually get addressed formally, the most important part of the equation, the people’s working relationship, remains damaged forever.

Workplace mediation offers a very credible alternative.  It is a voluntary, informal process that helps people who are in dispute to start talking again, and to jointly agree how better to work together.

In the post-mediation evaluations of the hundreds of cases that UK Mediation has worked with, most participants report benefits from simply having taken part and having come to the table with their colleague, manager, or team member.  In the majority of cases, provided people want this, there can also be a more specific agreement produced through the mediation about their improved understanding, and about what they agree will be different between them from now on.

You may have questions about using mediation in your own workplace, about whether to use external mediators or to look at setting up your own in-house provision, about enmeshing mediation within your existing formal processes, or about the use of mediation within the new Employment Act.

If you want to request a mediator to resolve your workplace dispute or an ongoing conflict that is affecting your team, then please use the contact form. We look forward to hearing from you and will be in contact shortly.

If you would like to find out about workplace mediation training, or organising an workplace mediation training course, then please contact us.