You’re doing my head in!

Why organisations should embrace mediation for the sake of everyone’s mental health.

Many employers only use standard grievance and disciplinary approaches to conflict resolution in and around the workplace, while ignoring the potential of mediation. By doing so, they put the mental health of their employees (including managers) at risk.

Furthermore, by fostering a toxic environment, they jeopardise the success of the organisation.

I recently acted as mediator in a complex employment dispute that had been going on for over a decade. In the interests of confidentiality, some details have been changed in the account below.

The dispute had taken its toll on many of those involved, including damaging their careers and reputations. The organisation had spent an enormous amount of time and resources trying to deal with the situation. The heaviest impact had been on the claimants. They regarded themselves as whistleblowers who had been subjected to serial victimisation and harassment. There was clear evidence that their mental health had been severely affected over a long period.

The employer’s internal dispute resolution mechanisms were the standard grievance, disciplinary and appeal procedures, with the customary nod towards the rights of whistleblowers. Predictably, far from helping to resolve the dispute, these processes had made things worse. In particular:

• The adversarial nature of the processes pushed people into opposing camps

• The investigation, hearing and appeal processes involved a series of increasingly stressful events for the claimants (and others), over a long period.

• This reinforced the claimants’ feelings of victimisation and harassment and fostered a lack of confidence in the impartiality of the various internal investigators and decision-makers

• In the employer’s camp the processes generated an increasing lack of confidence in the sincerity of the claimants

• Trust was evidently very low to start with and went rapidly downhill from there

• The opposing camps stopped listening to each other

• Deterioration in the claimants’ mental health increased the stakes on all sides.

The mediation took place at a late stage, with external legal proceedings grinding towards trial and everyone lawyered-up. Mediation resulted in resolution of the issues and settlement of the legal claims. No doubt, it was not a perfect outcome for anyone, but it was an outcome that everyone felt they could live with.

I’d like to be able to say that this was due to the brilliance of the mediator, but it wasn’t. It was due to the power of the mediation process, especially (in my view) the following:

• The supportive and flexible nature of the process, which allowed vulnerabilities and concerns about mental health to be taken into account – for example, in terms of who was there in supporting roles. It is particularly useful to have someone present who can help everyone understand how a specific mental health issue can affect a person’s perceptions and reactions.

• The confidential and protected nature of the process, which allowed people to speak directly and openly to each other.

• The dynamic nature of the process, which allowed specific conversations to take place between different individuals on different aspects of the situation.

• The creation of a forum in which, little by little, people began to listen to each other. By the end, they certainly didn’t all agree on everything, but they could at least see the others’ points of view.

A much earlier mediation would have been very likely to have resolved the situation without the destructive impact on the mental health and well-being of those involved. But like so many other employers, this organisation got stuck in the tramlines of its standard procedures.

If we are to cope with rising tide of mental health issues in the workplace, this has to change.

[Image credit BodyParts3D/Anatomography, CC BY-SA 2.1 JP <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons]