Find out what happened at the Civil Mediation Council Conference
As the 20th October marked the end of Mediation Awareness Week, we look back on what happened on the 19th of October. As part of raising awareness, the Civil Mediation Council (CMC) organised an event titled ‘Save Time, Save Money, Save Stress: Resolution at Work’. This event was held at Lloyds Banking Group’s Group Learning Centre in Solihull.
Invited to be at the event were several high calibre experts and speakers who contributed to the success of making it a sell-out conference. Among those who were on the panel was PJW Director, 
Pamela Whitehead.
Running from 3:15pm to 6:15pm, multiple expert speakers who were from companies that had successfully completed resolution at work presented their findings to the delegates who attended. Of those in attendance were owners and managers from small businesses to corporate enterprises.
Along with the talks was an audience and panel Q&A, where the audience asked questions to a panel of experts regarding any queries they had relating to resolution at work. On this panel, Pamela shared opportunities to answer questions with experts such as Pat Hicks, the Senior Advisor at Acas and Paul Christner from Lloyds Banking Group.
Pamela was able to comment on a number of issues relating to workplace resolution during the conference. One of these was regarding workplace culture and making sure managers and owners understand the importance of noticing discord within the team and effectively dealing with this early and not leaving it in the hope it will sort itself.
She told managers that they should be equipped with the training and knowledge of how to have these difficult conversations with their colleagues and teams and how best to approach these subjects. Pulling on some of her personal experiences of mediating conflict was one specific scenario where a manager and a colleague had come to mediation in an attempt to resolve their dispute referred as “performance issues” had led to the break down in the relationship. In joint session a situation was referred to by the colleague which the manager discounted, when I asked, “when did this take place” the colleague responded May 2014 over three years ago! That specific exchange was at the heart of it.
As a panel member, Pamela took the opportunity to share with the HR teams and managers the importance of understanding different cultures fully and how to appropriately deal with working in a diverse working environment. It brings so many opportunities however leaders and managers don’t take the time to fully understand and often for whatever reason find themselves shying away from it and avoiding – that is very often the cause of conflict. Stating we have a Policy and ticking the box isn’t good enough.
Those who were speakers at the event, who had tried and succeeded with workplace resolution, were able to cover the following topic areas:
- Workplace Conflict (an Interactive Session with Audience and Polling)
- The Evolution of Mediation in the Lloyds Banking Group
- Introducing an Internal Workplace Mediation Scheme – The Journey
- How I Saw the Light: From Sceptic to Convert
- Successful Mediation in Practice
- The Challenge to Have Courageous Conversations
- Unsuccessful Mediations – Turning Refusal or Failure to Your Advantage.
Take a look back at the events that we’ve supported as part of Mediation Awareness Week and the blogs and live streams that you can view for yourself:
Don’t bury your head in the sand this Mediation Awareness Week
Brexit And Mediation – Mediation Awareness Week (MAW17)
Family Mediation – Mediation Awareness Week (MAW17)
If you’ve learnt anything for yourself or your business thanks to these events, make sure you tweet us @PJW_HR or Post on our Facebook Page: PJW HR Consultancy.
If you would like to understand more about how to avoid lengthy and costly conflict situations in the workplace, and/or how we can help your managers and leaders to deal with conflict in the moment get in touch we have a variety of options available