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.

Professional mediators are often surprised to learn of what people who have never experienced the process believe it to be. 

In one of my mediation training programs, a participant took on the challenge to find out what people think mediation is. She decided to simply ask people standing in line in grocery stores waiting to check out. One person said she believed it was “when you close your eyes and try not to think of anything.”

A fair number were quick to respond that it was how you dealt with child custody and visitation. Asked what they thought about the process, most said it was unpleasant and not satisfying. That so many people associate mediation with child custody and visitation issues is certainly a problem. For one reason, many people who have experienced child custody and visitation mediation do have a bad impression of the outcome and, hence, fault the process. Actually, those types of sessions are so very different from other kinds they don’t give an accurate impression of other forms of mediation. 

A smaller number had been involved in a law suit where the court had referred their case to mediation. Court-referred mediation often involves only the attorneys for the parties. The parties themselves may not have any knowledge of the process other than what their attorney tells them. Their evaluation is then more often than not an evaluation of the outcome rather than of the process itself. If they didn’t get the outcome they desired, they tended to blame hoiw the mediation was conducted.

And then there are those who participate in mediation with the objective of “getting everything they were asking for.” If they settled for something different or less than what they expected, they too blamed mediation as the reason.

It all comes down to the parties objectives. If the parties want to prove the other is wrong and want to punish them, or just ant to continue to fight, then mediation won’t satisfy that desire. But if the parties are ready to focus on the future of their relationship, mediation can work wonders.