SHOULD MANAGERS MEDIATE?

Whether you work remotely or face-to-face, conflicts are often a part of the business world. In fact, one early study found that managers spend 20% of their time dealing with conflicts. A later study put that at 2.8 hours per week. And a more recent survey of 5,000 full-time workers in the United States, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, revealed that almost 30% of employees deal with conflict frequently and that 85% deal with it to some degree.

Conflicts that aren’t dealt with in the workplace do have considerable negative outcomes. Those can include project failure, absences, resignations and terminations, reassignment, personal attacks, and bullying. What should be management’s role? The survey of the 5,000 workers asked what they thought management should do. About 6% felt that management should do nothing. The top three suggestions workers had were (1) identify and address underlying tensions before things go wrong (2) have more informal one-to-one conversations with people they manage and (3) act as a mediator to resolve the issue. 

But here’s the problem: While 40% of workers want managers to act as mediators, most managers have never received any formal conflict management training, and as a consequence, don’t see acting as a mediator as part of their role. Mediation in the workplace can be of two types: Bring in an external mediator to the help with a dispute or train internal managers so that they have mediation skills they can apply when disputes arise.

Perhaps the most extensive use of external mediators is by the U.S. Postal Service. In the mid 1990s in Florida, employees filed a class action suit complaining among other things that the post office Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaint process was slow, remote and ineffective in dealing with workplace disputes. The parties agreed that a workplace mediation program would be an effective way to address issues in the post office, so a pilot program launched in 1994 grew nationwide and is now known as REDRESS and available to all postal service employees. The style of mediation used in the program is known as the transformative style of mediation that as implemented in the post office has the objective to “transform” working relationships by having the disputing parties openly discuss their issues to gain a better knowledge of their conflicts and improve their skills to communicate with each other. The Post Office believes that this results in a better workplace environment. 

My belief and experience is that managers themselves can learn to employ mediation skills to help workers deal with workplace conflicts quickly and easily, which in turn will avoid negative consequences to the organization and to the individuals involved.