Question

Facts:

Family Connection is a non-profit community agency located in Sarnia, Ontario. The mandate of the organization is to assist local low-income families. The organization hosts educational programs on a variety of issues including: parenting, healthy living and supporting children with disabilities. Family Connection also provides family therapy sessions and has a small food bank on site.

Family Connection is funded by the Ontario government. This funding changes every year and is entirely within the control of the Ontario government. Family Connection tries to supplement its budget through fundraising and donations. These revenue steams are fairly small and totally unreliable.

The organization employs one nurse (Felicity), one social service worker (Marty), one administrative support staff (Becky) and an Executive Director.

The original Executive Director, Evelyn, retired three months ago. Evelyn is a nurse and she founded the organization in 1975. Since then she alone has managed the organization and has hand-picked all of the staff.

Evelyn's replacement, Emily was hired by the Ontario government. The job competition was open and many qualified applicants were considered. Felicity was a serious contender for the position but the Ontario government decided on Emily, an outside hire.

Emily graduated from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario with an MBA in 2008. She spent the last two years working in Toronto in the private sector. She decided to take this job because she was looking to live and work in a smaller community where the pace is slower and more relaxed.

When Emily arrived at Family Connection three months ago she began to make a number of changes. These changes are summarized as follows:

Situation 3: Vacation Policy

Emily also decided that she needs to update the vacation policy since it has not changed since 1975 and is not in line with the Employment Standards Act. The employees have told her that Evelyn dealt with vacation in a casual manner and never referred to the 1975 policy. Senior employees received more vacation time than junior employees but no one was able to provide Emily with any additional details. Emily has decided to draft a new vacation policy herself. However, she has asked Felicity to conduct some initial research for her.

Felicity is the most senior employee. She has worked at Family Connection for over 25 years. When she started with the organization she did not receive any vacation time. She feels that she has "paid her dues" and that she is entitled to considerably more vacation time than some of the junior employees. In recent years, Evelyn was very generous with Felicity's vacation time and Felicity has been known to take up to 10 weeks of paid vacation a year. Felicity feels threatened by Emily's desire to streamline the vacation policy. She fears that she will lose vacation time and that some junior employees who have not "paid their dues" will receive increased vacation time.

Felicity expressed her concerns to Emily. Emily's response was "it is time that this organization moved into the new millennium. Our new vacation policy will reflect industry standards not casual whims." These remarks made Felicity very angry. She believes that she is much more qualified for the position of Executive Director than Emily. Felicity recently stormed into Emily's office and declared that she was not going to complete the research for Emily and that she had no intention of losing any of her vacation time. Felicity also said that she was aware that Becky was working on developing best practices for the office procedures and that Marty was in the process of changing Family Connection's mandate. Felicity made it clear to Emily that she had no intention of changing the way that she worked nor would she tolerate a change in the mandate.

Emily was shocked that Felicity challenged her authority in this manner. She suspended Felicity for three days without pay. Following this incident, Felicity filed a Human Rights Application against Family Connection and Emily alleging age discrimination.

Family Connection has had to hire its own lawyer to defend against the Human Rights Application. This is very costly. Emily has become very stressed and has started to see a therapist, which takes her out of the office during work time.

Emily is very frustrated with Felicity. She is becoming more and more frustrated with Becky and Marty. She tasked them with new job duties months ago and has heard nothing from them. Emily assumes that if Becky or Marty had questions or concerns that they would come forward and set up a meeting with her. Emily does not want to follow up with her employees too much because she does not want to be perceived as micro-managing.

Felicity is so frustrated that she invited all of the employees over to her house after hours. She proposed the idea of organizing a union. Marty is very much in favour of the idea. He also advocated for the idea of complaining to the Ontario government about Emily in the hopes of having her removed. Becky is terrified of the idea of unionization and fears that Emily will find out and fire her.

Emily has told her therapist about all of the conflict that she is dealing with at work. Emily's therapist convinced her to invest some of Family Connection's scarce resources into hiring a Conflict Resolution Expert (you) to develop a conflict resolution plan that will hopefully resolve the problems in this workplace.

Task:

As a conflict advisor to Family Connections, your job is to provide advice on a possible way to resolve the situation assigned to you. Please clearly identify the situation you will be analyzing. You will have the opportunity to include comments and explanations for some of the following ADR concepts:

·        Asses if this is a situation of conflict or dispute

·        Has the situation escalated? - growth of conflict

·        What are the interests of the parties?

·        What are some common and conflicting interests of the parties?

·        What emotions are at play in this scenario?

·        Do you see any power imbalances present?

·        What approach would you advice to use on order to resolve the situation? Negotiation or mediation, and why? Please also define the type of negotiation (Positional or Interest-based) or mediation (Evaluative or Facilitative) Discuss the steps of the process

·        What micro skills should be applied by the parties in the process?

·        Can you think of a possible way for the two people involved (in your chosen scenario) to resolve the situation with mutual gain?

·        If the parties are unsuccessful in using your prescribed approach, what would the next step be?

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