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Workshop: Making Bargaining Work – negotiating skills with a difference
Workshop presenters:
Anna Booth Director, CoSolve
Clive Thompson Director, CoSolve
Joint training for management and union/employee negotiators
Another round of enterprise bargaining looming? Most unions will be intent in protecting members' past gains and ferreting out arguments to boost the next wage packet. Cost reductions and efficiency-seeking workplace changes will probably be on the minds of most employers. Clearly, there will be winners and losers. Appropriate preparations will involve strategies to placate and outmanoeuvre, and negotiation skills - as ever - will turn on bluff, bravado and timing.
Most stakeholders are not only conditioned to this approach - they are comfortable with it. For them it reflects a realistic take on the unsentimental world of industrial relations, and there is a sort of robust honesty about it. Just a pity about the fall-out: minimalist settlements and soured relations. Not much scope for "employer of choice" results, but then what can you expect if you operate in a unionised environment?
Quite a lot more, actually. But it takes some discipline, investment and imagination. Our program Making Bargaining Work equips management and union/employee negotiators to work with the approach developed and refined at Harvard and MIT over recent decades - "interest-based" or "mutual gains" bargaining. It's a methodology that requires parties to undertake negotiations with a careful analysis of their own and other stakeholders' interests rather than than just resorting to positions (specific claims). This allows negotiators to canvass widely for outcomes rather than concentrate the negotiation on the strengths and weaknesses of opposing positions. Interest-based outcomes promote the mutual gain of all parties and offer long-term advantage. Shared interests, differing interests and conflicting interests raise different opportunities and challenges, and need to be dealt with differently.
Making Bargaining Work draws on the extensive practical experience of the presenters and also, with permission, the learnings offered by Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation and in particular the highly acclaimed and workplace-oriented programs of Harvard and MIT's Institute for Work and Employment Relations, Negotiating Labor Agreements and After the Handshake: Delivering the Results Labor and Management Expect. Lecture style presentation is interspersed with practical exercises that highlight and reinforce theory.
The logic of the approach - being trained for mutual gain rather than competitive advantage - means that both/all side's negotiators are trained together.
Program: Training for the negotiation and implementation of enterprise agreements
1. Context for negotiating enterprise agreements
Examination of recent changes to industrial relations legislation in Australia impacting the scope and structure of enterprise bargaining.
2. Introduction to Interest-Based Negotiation
Positions and interests, typical negotiating tactics contrasted with interest-based negotiation, challenge of pure interest-based negotiation and the concept of blended bargaining
3. Stages of negotiation
Stage 1 Prepare
Steps to be taken by parties in caucus preliminary to commencing negotiation
Stage 2 Plan
Parties negotiate over the process of negotiations
Stage 3 Open and explore
The commencement of negotiations where interest are identified and options generated.
Stage 4 Focus and agree
The stage that parties begin to narrow their options towards finally reaching agreement on an outcome.
Stage 5 Implement and sustain
Post negotiation the steps parties take to implement their agreement and obtain the benefits promised within.
4. Scenario role play
Participants are given the opportunity to test their skills through a scenario, with the presenters in the roles of facilitators and mediators.
Variations on a theme: Blended Bargaining
In practice, no bargaining encounter can be neatly categorised as either purely traditional or purely interest-based — in most cases bargaining exchanges will display elements of both. Often parties tell us that they would like to break away from their usual (rather tired and combative) style, but don't necessarily want to undertake the Full Monty of mutual gains bargaining. They don't know enough about it, or they feel the trust basis is not in place to allow the alternative approach to deliver on its promises.
Fair enough. For this very reason, we also offer parties training in Blending Bargaining (what the US Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service calls "modified traditional bargaining"). The training represents a variation of the terrain of our standard program and introduces a stretch framework to facilitate parties moving beyond conventional bargaining in ways appropriate to their particular circumstances and developing relationships.
| What appears above is the format of our regular public workshop. If you would prefer to have one dedicated to the skilling up of just your organisation's negotiators – management and union/employee teams – we also present workplace-specific workshops on request. | |
