Workplace Mediation

Workplace Mediation, based in Cornwall

If you have 2 or more valued workers stuck in conflict that's impacting their performance and affecting your bottom line, we can work with them, confidentially, to defuse the issues without you having to use internal grievance or disciplinary procedures. 

Your internal procedures waste management time, cause meetings that will probably generate more conflict, expose you to legal fees, and can make a working environment untenable.  This type of situation can also expose the business to risk because it has to make decisions within those procedures. If someone has to leave, they take your trade secrets and confidential information, and generate gossip.  The business then has to pay to recruit and train their replacement. 

A business can't impartially fix its internal disputes; it's not impartial to them and managers and leaders end up taking sides and trying to rebuild something that worked fine, replacing team members who would have resolved their differences if they had been offered the right opportunity. 

For staff, once things become formal, the ability to save relationships between previously solid team members becomes close to impossible, resulting only in determinations about who was right and who was wrong. Nobody is happy. People get labelled by accusations. Others regret starting a grievance process they can't stop, and find they are stuck having to work under the label of being a trouble-maker. Resentment leads to untenable relationships that could have been fixed. People pick sides and mutterings start, and then they leak to competitors. 

We work with staff members without reporting confidential information to employers, so that the staff know that their concerns, and the drivers behind them, are being heard. 

Businesses shouldn't invite staff to start grievances; they should be pro-actively doing all they can to avoid that. We're leading the way in Cornwall to making this the normal way to go, rather than managing good workers out of their jobs. 

Steps to retain relationships need to be taken promptly and confidentially; the longer a business waits, the greater the impact on its profitability. More and more, HR professionals and directors in charge of budget allocation are realising that a small outlay at the blossoming of a dispute can save significant sums in real financial cost, as well as morale and reputation, avoiding the need to take sides between workers in conflict. Misunderstandings can be addressed and relationships between staff, the whole lifeblood of any business, can be restored without the business having to get its hands dirty. And all completely confidential - genuinely off the record. 

The Process

After an introduction from a business, we meet with each of the workers involved to reach an understanding of their point of view, either remotely or in person, usually for up to 2 hours. Afterwards, we arrange a regular mediation under normal mediation rules but without lawyers, to ensure we understand, and then try to narrow, the issues to get to points of agreement.  Our goal is to allow the parties to work together in the future. We prepare an agreed statement of outcomes containing steps that should be taken, which is presented to the business as a solution agreed by the conflicting workers, and follow up as necessary to help in ensuring that the agreed steps have been taken. Confidentiality of the individuals concerned is maintained throughout. 

The Civil Mediation Council explains the process here. 

Our standard prices are here. 

Interested in hearing more? Email workplace@propermediation.co.uk or start a WhatsApp chat