Negotiation
Negotiation is essential part of our lives and most activities that we assume involve some form of negotiation. Different negotiations result into different outcomes based on the nitty-gritties of the negotiation and the advantage held by one of the parties. A fair negotiation process involves parties to the negotiation having an equal chance to provide their argument and imperative elements that can be undertaken to attain the desired outcomes. I have been involved in many negotiations from a personal and professional point of view. However, in this discussion I will consider a recent negotiation which involved negotiation for paid leave days extension at my workplace. The negotiation did not yield the best possible solution for all parties.
The negotiation experience
As a result of recent COVID-19 pandemic, our company gave a notice of paid leave for all employees for two months and subsequent half pay until the epidemic is over. We felt that the company was overstepping in its mandate to slash employee salary amid the pandemic. We sought to negotiate with the company management on extension of the paid leave. We agreed that few of employees will meet the management and present our demands. Considering the short notice that we received we did not engage the employee labor union which is officially tasked with negotiating employee issues with the management.
We gave the management the option to extend paid leave or else all employees will down our tools and paralyze operations within the company. We did not give the company a leverage on the options that they could consider so that we reach an amicable decision. We met the management representatives but we failed to reach a solution mainly because we had fixed demands rather than possible alternatives that the we could explore together. The next day after the meeting, we received another memo from management which threatened to suspend all of us who were spearheading the negotiation terming it as illegal and a breach to the existing contract we signed upon employment. We realized that our mission was unsuccessful and knew that if we went ahead with planned industrial action , our contracts would be terminated easily.
How the negotiation could have been conducted better
Negotiation is a process that tries to find a solution to certain specific problem or an issue. A good negotiation offers the parties involved an equal chance to argue and provide convincing reasons as to why the decision made should favor their goal (Martin & Max, 2019). Every party to a negotiation process must have best alternative and least alternative which ca help reach a favorable solution to both parties. Our negotiation was one-sided and did not offer the management an opportunity to discuss our demands and propose solutions that they considered would be favorable.
Failure to follow protocol in notifying the employee labor union was a mistake because we did not have a better structure that could be used to make informed decision (Perreault et al., 2017). The course has provided a better understanding on the negotiation techniques and the level of preparedness required to have a successful process the key aspects that have been outlined include negotiation goal, initiation stage, problem solving stage and resolution.
The initiation stage involves introduction of the issue and the ground rules. These key techniques to negotiation did not happen in the negotiation experience discussed. The problem solving stage allow each of the parties to argue their cases. The resolution stage involves assessment of the BATNAs (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement) and LATNAs (Least Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) for both parties. Each party to negotiation approaches the negotiation table with the view to win. Therefore, it is crucial to follow better approaches which focus on building a strong change process in attaining better outcomes.
References
Beitelspacher, L., Holmes, Y., Hochstein, B., & Bolander, W. (2017). Examining Negotiation Strategies in the B2C Context: Consumer Persuasion Knowledge vs. Seller Negotiation Techniques. In Marketing at the Confluence between Entertainment and Analytics (pp. 1059-1064). Springer, Cham.
Martin, A., & Max, E. (2019). Negotiation Strategies. Academic Entrepreneurship for Medical and Health Scientists, 1(1), 9.
Perreault, S., Kida, T., & David Piercey, M. (2017). The Relative Effectiveness of Simultaneous versus Sequential Negotiation Strategies in Auditor‐Client Negotiations. Contemporary Accounting Research, 34(2), 1048-1070.