Negotiating skills and collective conciliation key in today’s climate
Acas has published its latest Policy Discussion Paper on the role collective conciliation and negotiating skills play in resolving large-scale disputes. The paper highlights the need for HR managers to be trained in the skills needed to manage collective relations as they face uncertain situations that are new and challenging.
The new Acas paper, The alchemy of dispute resolution: the role of collective conciliation, highlights the importance of these processes in settling disputes at a crucial time. It states that while collective conciliation has been part of the industrial relations landscape for over 100 years, its application in settling disputes between groups of employees and employers has changed and evolved over that time, as has the incidence of its use.
More recently, a complex set of factors including the growth in the statutory individual employment rights framework, the aims of trade unions and the dwindling experience of HR and employee representatives – the key players in collective conciliation – have all played a role in influencing the extent to which collective conciliation remains a firm fixture of workplace collective relations.
Acas argues that the recent unofficial action at the Lindsey oil refinery that sparked sympathy protests across the country highlighted just how fragile collective employment relations can be when the economy is in crisis. And it brings to the fore the very important role of collective conciliation, even in areas of illegal action, in dealing swiftly with the potential economic damage that industrial disputes can give rise to. And yet, as Acas points out, collective conciliation is not simply a tool to deal with conflict when relations have reached this level of deadlock, it is most effective and indeed most common when relations are difficult but have not yet broken down entirely.
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