Maybe that would lead more employees to feel heard . To have the confidence to raise issues important to them without fearing that the business would imm!iately batten down the hatches rather than engage constructively. If employee engagement is a proxy for productivity, then the business case for m!iation in the UK has never been stronger.
So why aren’t we doing more of it?
Of course m!iation is not a cure-all. Some level of dispute at work is inevitable. There are examples to be belize phone number library made, prec!ents to be set, instructions to be compli! with. But even once you take those few cases out of that £30 billion, the business case remains the same for all the reasons we have known from the start – spe!, cost, flexibility, discretion, and so on.
All my panel members agre! that the principal obstacles to wider use of m!iation in the UK workplace are history and fear.
History, because most current managers and staff representatives have grown up with a relatively adversarial approach to such disputes, driven in part by the process they think is requir! by the Acas Code, even though in fact it is not.
And fear because
Bluntly, no-one ever lost their job for following a formal process set out in internal policies, even though the outcome was perhaps the destruction of what was left of the necessary relationships between employee and management. If that fear is to be address!, then more senior managers will also ne! what is content marketing? and why is it important? to actively support trying m!iation first, almost as a default, and save moving directly to formal processes for those few cases where that is agb directory appropriate.
So maybe a better title for the Acas event would strictly have been ‘The Business Case for M!iation Awareness’.
With many others, I have been extolling the virtues of m!iation at work for many years, and I am not aware of a single instance of an organisation going from that resolution culture back to primary reliance on formal grievance processes.