How to encourage negotiation in the workplace

Encouraging negotiation in your workplace is crucial if you want to engage your colleagues and create a positive working environment in which everyone can contribute their ideas. You can support better negotiation skills in your organisation by embracing a few of these ideas:

Begin by listening

First up create an ethos in your workplace that fosters discussion and the sharing of ideas in a respectful atmosphere. The crucial aspect here is to begin by listening; let your colleagues know that you’re accessible and always willing to listen to them.

Negotiating necessitates both talking and listening. Listening is the top tip given by Cathie Black, previously chairman and president of Hearst Magazines to improve negotiation in the workplace. You need to listen if you are ever to achieve a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Be accessible

To foster better negotiation in your workplace, you and your leadership team will need to be accessible. Whether you organise Directors visits to key company locations, host company breakfasts or are regularly seen out on the shop floor; accessibility is important in encouraging negotiation. If your leadership team is aloof and absent, it’s unlikely you’ll ever achieve this, accessibility and openness are crucial.

Trust and integrity

To encourage negotiation in your workplace, you need to foster a culture of trust and integrity so that your colleagues feel happy conversing and negotiating with each other. If the trust isn’t there, people will in all likelihood feel less happy about being open and negotiating.

Encourage team working

Encouraging team working in your workplace is one way to foster that respect and trust; helping to build a collaborative environment in which colleagues are happy communicating and negotiating.

A balanced relationship

You’ll also need to establish a balanced relationship within the workplace between the different parties, from the leadership team to your colleagues at all levels and the unions. A management that is top down in style, rather than collaborative, won’t create the balanced relationship you need for better negotiations. It’s what Fells and Prowse have termed ‘symmetry’ in the nature of management.

Two-way communications

To encourage better negotiation in the workplace, you need to establish two-way communications, where all the interested parties get a chance to both contribute their views and ideas; and to listen. So setting up workplace committees and having regular staff meetings might be a way forward in this respect.

Encourage feedback

Encourage feedback within the business to foster better negotiation. Ask your employees to contribute their bright ideas for improvements within the organisation, from product enhancements to better customer service or how to streamline processes. Having an opportunity to input ideas is one step you can take to engaging your employees and making them feel valued – all important to encouraging negotiation in the workplace.

So there you have a few ideas on how to encourage negotiation in the workplace. Now it’s time to get started. Want to get your new company up and running; and off on the right track? Then Setup A Company can provide expert advice and support in founding your business.

Categorised in: Uncategorised

This post was written by Chris Beck