October welcomed Mediation Awareness Week, where a number of events take place, in order to raise awareness around conflict in the workplace and how mediation can offer an effective, informal and confidential resolution to this. As part of this week, Timmy Kurtuldum, CiC’ s Mediation Manager was invited to Lincolns Inn Law Courts to be part of an interactive mock mediation and a guest panellist answering questions around workplace mediation and conflict in the workplace.
Hosted by Tony Buon, who works in collaboration with CiC, this event was attended by around 40 individuals from across all industry sectors and received excellent feedback outlining the unique characteristics of mediation.
The event featured live vignettes of a “mock mediation” and aimed to inform people about the practices and potential of Workplace Mediation in the UK. The mock mediations demonstrated were (mediator, parties) performed by Timmy Kurtuldum, Amanda Smith and Andrew Kinder. This event allowed HR and other professionals to experiences mediation first hand and ask questions to the team of experts.
The panel were then available to answer questions and some interesting topics were covered such as:
- What is suitable for mediation and what is not?
- How can you get Managers to signpost to mediation?
- How does it fit in with bullying and harassment policies?
The profile of workplace mediation has increased in the UK in recent years, with many organisations now trying to promote mediation services and embed this as a long term strategy of managing workplace conflict.
The types of issues covered are varied but may include; bullying and harassment, team conflict, interpersonal differences, disputes over resources, manager/employee conflict, performance reviews and issues related to grievance handling.
Mediation is an essential resource for organisations. It helps improve employee relationships, increase productivity, reduce sickness absence and reduces the time and costs of formal grievances and disciplinary cases.
CiC offers a quick and cost-effective confidential Mediation service that will help organisations prevent and manage interpersonal difficulties to enable better working relationships, build more successful teams and maximise organisations performance.
For more information on our Mediation Services, contact Timmy on tkurtuldum@cic-eap.co.uk.