Blog Posts: March 2011

One of the problems facing the public and say human resources is the difficulty in finding a good mediator. Why is this the case when there are so many mediators on the market? After all,  there is a vast over-supply of mediators. There are a number of reasons why there are problems. 1. The ease of which one can become a mediator. It can take only a 5 day course and then one can call onself an accredited mediator. Barriers to entry of the profession are low. 2. Lack of experience o....

Many organisations have started implementing mediation schemes and indeed my firm does a fair bit of consultancy of this. It is all very well deciding to implement a mediation scheme but what are the key attributes of a successful internal mediator? After all you need good mediators to help administer the scheme. Is it intelligence, position of hieracrchy in the firm, robustness under pressure? I believe that there are the following key attributes and they do differ from what an external me....

Some of the work which my firm has done is to help develop internal mediators within an organisation. Essentially an organisation which has a number of employment disputes recruit a firm like mine and we train a number of people to become internal mediators. They deal with the internal disputes. One of the questions is do internal mediators work? is the training of internal mediators worth the investment? The simple answer is that they can be, but it does require a high commitment from&n....

Much discussion with the public sector focuses on redundancies or adjusting pay or pensions. Whilst these issues are important one of the key issues within the public sector is the management of the poor performer. Why? Because organisations cannot afford redundancy payments. There is pressure to avoid paying these out and a consequence focusing on performance is key to managing staff. But if you are human resource manager how do you deal with the poor perfomer. What are the key mediatio....