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USING MEDIATION IN THE WORKPLACE E.ON CASE STUDY


Interview with Dr Jurgen Klowait, Former Counsel, E.ON


E.ON’s mediation scheme in Germany was very pioneering and successful. How did you get buy-in and what are you particularly proud of?


How to get buy-in for such a project is indeed the crucial question. The main driver for E.ON’s mediation scheme was to support the values and behaviours within E.ON’s corporate culture. When I launched the project in early 2006, E.ON strongly promoted its revised corporate culture, at that time called “OneE.ON”. OneE.ON fostered values and behaviours such as openness, respect and mutual trust. In other words, mediation appeared to be a perfect fit to ensure that the espoused values were actually practised, even when those values are most challenged, i.e. in the case of disputes. Shortly


setting up the framework for the mediation scheme our initiative was awarded with the “OneE.ON Innovation Award” and that gave me and my team “official” encouragement to implement all the follow-up steps for a full launch. The idea behind E.ON’s mediation scheme was to establish a “pool” of in-house mediators to assist with internal conflicts – all kinds of workplace conflicts, disputes between divisions within one group company and conflicts between E.ON group companies. From 2006 to 2012, an interdisciplinary


after pool of “E.ON-


mediators” was established, consisting of more than 120 people from about 20 different business units across the group. Looking back, it is good to see that through mediation many group internal conflicts could indeed be solved on the basis of the corporate values mentioned above. I also relied heavily on the constant commitment of both my “core team” (the Legal Department I ran at that time) and those colleagues who decided to become E.ON- mediators, all on top of their existing workload. Finally, it was very rewarding to see the impact of conflict resolution on the individual parties taking part in mediation. Just as an example: I recall a mediation between the management and the Works Council of a major power plant, triggered by a highly charged conflict. When conducting this mediation – one of a number needed to settle the dispute – participants reported that they had been asked by their colleagues: “What happened? You seem to treat each other in a completely different and co-operative way now”. If evidence was needed that not only does mediation work, but it has the very real potential to improve corporate cultural behaviours, here it is.


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What obstacles did you face and how did you get around these? What were the learning points?


In general support for the mediation project was remarkable with no “real” obstacles. However, it certainly was a challenge to promote mediation. 10 years ago mediation was generally less known in Germany and hardly anyone in E.ON was aware of its key characteristics and benefits. It needed an early and extensive communication campaign to explain what mediation is, when it makes sense to use it and how you start the mediation process, and it took some time for the demand to build. Of course there are some learning points, too. To mention just one: we started to train internal mediators to establish our pool. It was only 2-3 years later that we supplemented the team by the training of internal “conflict advisors”. These were mostly colleagues who worked in functions which typically serve as a first point of contact when disputes arise (HR, Works Council, Equal


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