We occasionally get asked why you can’t mediate discrimination or bullying claims, because that’s what ACAS have advised. We love ACAS for what they specialise in, but it isn’t mediation! 

Around half the cases we mediate involve discrimination or bullying claims, which many people will shy away from because they’re either too difficult or too emotional. There are around 50,000 employment tribunals backlogged in the UK at the time of writing and that’s because conciliation doesn’t deliver the results like mediation does - and for us that’s more than 95% of cases reaching a mutual resolution.

I often get asked what makes the perfect mediator - the answer is there’s no such thing! There are, however, a number of attributes that make a great workplace mediator and in this blog I talk about a few of these.

Mediation really is very much about the person you are rather than the job you do.

Probably 90% of the time that you’ll utilise your new skills won’t officially be in a mediation, as they really are life skills - you’ll see a huge benefit outside of work too!

How do we get our managers to have difficult conversations? It’s a question we hear all the time from senior executives and HR professionals who are frustrated by managers not taking accountability for their people. The frustration is understandable, but so is the manager’s inability to have these discussions. They’re only perceived as ‘difficult’ because they don’t have the confidence, and they don’t have the confidence because they haven’t been developed with the tools and techniques to enable them to have proper conversations. 

21st March is an important day, as it’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In this blog, one of our mediators Derek shares his own personal insights from arriving in the UK as a black teenager through to how mediation mediation really is making a difference.

Whilst there are well-known advisory services who say that discrimination cases can’t be mediated, they’re completely wrong! What they mean is such conversations can be harder to facilitate so they shy away from them, which is where proper professional mediators come into their own.

Often people call us having attended a mediator training course and ask us how to do workplace mediations! That’s because they’ve been sold a civil and commercial mediator programme and reassured it will cover them for workplace mediation. It simply isn’t true! 

Whilst there is the option to do a further day of training after those courses, it isn’t enough to give you the dedicated skills and competence to be a great workplace mediator!