Can your organisation benefit from our conflict resolution services?
Conflict and grievances between staff members is a common, yet time-consuming and costly problem that can have a severe impact on your organisation’s bottom line and ability to service clients. Despite this, many managers lack the ability or willingness to confront and resolve such issues.
Workplace conflict can arise at any time between individuals; as the result of clashing personalities, miscommunication over simple issues, different interpretations of workplace policies or practices, a perception of hidden agendas or lack of trust. These factors create bad relations between staff or staff and their managers and as a result, productivity and workplace harmony is adversely impacted on as the focus becomes fixed on problems rather than solutions and person rather than team.
While some level of tension and misunderstanding is at times inevitable, left unresolved these will result in hostility, stress and wasted resources.
Mercury Commercial has extensive experience in working with staff to find workable, practical and most importantly, sustainable solutions to workplace conflict through our mediation or conciliation services. Our mediators are accredited under the National Standards now applying to mediators in Australia.
What is mediation?
Workplace mediation is a proven process where an experienced and independent mediator uses a number of techniques designed to allow disputing parties to come to an amicable settlement of their grievance or differences. Mediation is especially useful in dealing with disputes between staff that have a long history and/or been unable to be settled by more traditional means.
Successful mediation of a matter can allow an otherwise protracted issue to be quickly settled in a way that allows the parties to work together again and avoids the cost and disruption of litigation.
However, mediation is not suited to all matters and care should be taken to avoid mediation in matters where there is a big difference in power between the parties, unlawful conduct is alleged or in many cases of alleged sexual harassment.
The parties to a mediation should also be advised that a successful settlement of their matter will almost invariably rely on them making some concession/s to the other party – if one or both parties are unwilling or unable to come to the mediation in a spirit of compromise, there is a good chance that the mediation process is not suitable to their issue.
How does workplace conciliation differ from mediation?
While the mediation process relies on an experienced and independent mediator to facilitate viable solutions to issues from the participating parties, workplace conciliation is a slightly more formal process where both parties allow the conciliator to take a more active role in the process. This more active role generally involves the conciliator listening to the submissions of both parties and then coming up with a proposed terms of settlement for consideration and agreement by the parties.
Details of our methodology and pricing options for conflict resolution and mediation services are available on request. Use the Contact Us page to obtain fuller details.