With strikes taking place across multiple sectors, we are all following the negotiations between workers and their employers.
But how successful and efficient have their tactics been?
Stephen H White, chairman of negotiation skills consultancy Scotwork, reckons there's a lot to learn from the tactics employed by both sides.
When negotiating pay rises, is it better to start at a higher figure, or share a figure that is more likely to be accepted?
It depends. There is a process called ‘anchoring’, where the purpose of the initial demand is not to make a proposal which you expect the negotiation to be based around, but rather to structure expectations of the other parties.
An example: if I am buying a car in a showroom and the dealer offers me a 1% discount when I was expecting 10%, their proposal might modify my expectation downwards.
When the tactic is to start with a figure which you hope will be accepted there are three guidelines:
- it should be defendable and rational;
- it should be within the limits of acceptability of the other party – can they afford it, and;
- it must address the issues, needs and balance of power of all the parties, not just your side of the table.
This last one is why the train strikes are still not resolved – the union demand for is for pay increases, the employers want changes to working practices. Any deal will have to combine both.
Looking at the ongoing strike action, how do you keep emotions from affecting a negotiation?
Why would you want to? In the case of nurses, they encouraged employers and the public to remember their heroic work, particularly during Covid.
Employers encouraged nurses to mull over their duty to provide a service and encouraged the public to worry about the catastrophic effect on patients of unmanned or understaffed areas of a hospital and of a collapse of the ambulance service.
All these emotional factors will have influenced the negotiators at the table. However, good negotiators recognise that fanning these emotional flames in public is destructive – the serious negotiations take place behind closed doors, where the rhetoric can be left outside.
Is there anything the public can do to encourage a settlement in negotiations?
In theory public opinion is a powerful tool to push negotiators in the direction of a deal.
In practice, the public are usually divided on the issues in a dispute with the result that both sides can claim that public are on their side.
Ultimately the negotiators have to get on with it.
Has either side made any mistakes in the negotiation process, and what could have been done differently?
In my experience, based on the many hundreds of thousands of managers who have come to Scotwork to learn how to negotiate better, the four most common mistakes even experienced negotiators make are:
- spending too much time arguing the rights of their situation and not enough time negotiating creatively;
- making proposals that will never fly because they are one sided;
- failing to identify why the other side are really saying no to their proposals and reshaping them accordingly, and;
- failing to get maximum value from the negotiating chips at their disposal by recognising that some things have little value to one side but great value to the other side, and therefore present great trading opportunities.
Scotwork teaches that the best outcomes are achieved when both sides recognise that ‘win-win’, by creatively and collaboratively striving to make the pie bigger, is always better than ‘win-lose’ when the parties compete to make their share bigger at the expense of the other side.
Don't miss the latest headlines with our twice-daily newsletter - sign up here for free.
