It’s been a busy week of workplace mediations at Consensio, both in terms of facilitating mediation cases as well as speaking to parties who are attending upcoming mediations. Each party I have called has made the same comment: “I’ve never been through mediation before, so I don’t know what to expect.” As a workplace mediator, this is a tricky comment to deal with, as we have no idea what’s going to happen on the mediation day.
In a recent article we wrote for HR Director, we share three real life mediation cases which had very unexpected outcomes. Here’s a taster of the three scenarios:
1) After one hour of the joint meeting with his boss Steve, Jon storms out of the mediation meeting and doesn’t return.
2) Ewan refuses to sign the confidentiality agreement in a mediation with Ali. The mediator can’t proceed to the joint meeting unless both parties sign the document.
3) Ben and Andi go through the mediation process and come to a written agreement. But when the mediator types it up, Andi won’t sign it.
If you would like to find out what happens in each case, click here to read the full article.
Whilst we can’t give false reassurance to mediation parties about what will happen during mediation, we can prepare them as best we can for the process by creating a safe space for them to deal with the expected or unexpected!
