By TARA Mediation. ACEVO members can now access discounted mediation with TARA. Please check the website to find out more.
There’s a particular kind of tension that many charity leaders will recognise: two longstanding colleagues who can no longer be in the same room. A team divided by a grievance that started small and quietly grew. A senior manager whose relationship with their director has broken down so completely that both are now thinking about leaving.
Conflict in the workplace is not unusual. But in the charity sector, where teams are often small, funding is tight, and the mission depends on people pulling together, it can be especially damaging. And yet, many organisations still turn to formal HR processes, or, alternatively, do nothing at all, when something far more effective is available.
Mediation works. And for charity sector leaders, it may be one of the most valuable, and underused, tools at your disposal.
What is mediation?
Mediation is a confidential, structured conversation between two or more people in conflict, facilitated by a trained, neutral third party, often two. The mediator doesn’t take sides, impose solutions, or make judgements. Instead, they create the conditions in which people can speak honestly, hear one another, and, more often than not, find their own way through.
According to research by the Civil Mediation Council, mediation has an extremely high success rate, with 86% of all cases being settled. If you compare that to formal grievance procedures, which frequently leave all parties feeling worse even when a conclusion is reached, you can see why more organisations are making mediation their first response to conflict rather than their last resort.
Why it works
Formal processes are adversarial by design. They ask each party to build a case, assign blame, and reach a verdict. Whilst that may sometimes be necessary, it rarely repairs a relationship, and, in many workplace conflicts, the relationship is the thing that actually needs repairing.
Mediation works differently. It gives people the space to say what they’ve been unable to say, to feel genuinely heard, and to understand – sometimes for the first time – how the other person feels and to see things from the other’s perspective. Many conflicts, when examined in a safe environment, turn out to be rooted not in bad intent but in miscommunication, unmet expectations or needs, or unspoken frustration that has built up over time.
The mediator’s role is to hold that space: to slow things down, to ask the right questions, to help people move from entrenched positions to honest conversation. It requires skill, patience, and trust and when it works, the results can be transformative.
The real cost of getting it wrong
It’s easy to underestimate the actual cost of workplace conflict. The financial impact is rarely labelled as such and it shows up in other places, quietly and cumulatively.
Consider what happens when a capable employee leaves because a working relationship has become untenable. UK-based company Accounts and Legal say that an average employee costs around £12,000 to replace, whilst Centric HR estimate it at 6-9 months’ salary, depending on the role, with up to 213% of annual salary for highly educated executive positions. Traditional recruitment agencies charge 20-30% of starting annual salary. When you factor in onboarding, lost knowledge, and the time it takes a new person to reach full effectiveness this figure rises exponentially.
Now consider that conflict is one of the leading drivers of voluntary staff turnover. Lose one or two people a year to unresolved workplace rifts and the financial cost alone is significant for any organisation, but particularly for those working within the constraints of charity funding.
Then there is the added cost of management’s time. A simmering dispute doesn’t stay contained: it draws in managers, trustees, and HR leads who find themselves mediating informally, fielding one-sided accounts, and trying to hold teams together. That time has a value, even when it isn’t invoiced. Add to that the cost of formal processes if things escalate: HR investigations, legal advice, potential Employment Tribunal claims. A single contested dismissal or discrimination claim can cost tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees, quite apart from the reputational and emotional toll.
And then there is the human cost that no spreadsheet can capture: the damage to trust, to team cohesion, to the wellbeing of everyone caught up in the dispute. In a values-driven sector, where people come to work because they care about the mission, conflict that goes unaddressed can erode the very culture that makes an organisation worth working for.
Early intervention makes all the difference
The longer a dispute is left to fester, the more entrenched positions become, the more others are drawn in, and the harder it is to find a resolution. Mediation is most effective when it is used early, before a grievance is formally lodged, before solicitors are involved, before the relationship has passed the point of no return. This means that the culture around conflict matters as much as the processes. Leaders who treat conflict as a normal part of organisational life – something to be addressed directly and constructively – create environments where problems can be raised and resolved before they become crises. That doesn’t mean avoiding challenging conversations. It means having them differently.
What mediation looks like in practice
A typical mediation process involves an initial conversation with each participant separately, giving them the opportunity to share their perspective and understand what to expect. This is followed by a joint session – or sometimes a series of private and joint sessions – where the mediator guides a structured dialogue.
Agreements reached in mediation are owned by the participants. They tend to be practical, specific, and sustainable because they reflect what each person actually needs and can measure, rather than what a process has determined they should accept. Mediation is also confidential. What is said in the room stays in the room. This confidentiality is essential to the process; it creates the safety people need to make honest conversations possible.
For organisations without in-house expertise, external mediators bring independence and credibility that can be particularly valuable when internal relationships are at stake. TARA Mediation specialises in workplace mediation, bringing professional expertise and an understanding of the particular dynamics of the charity and not-for-profit sector.
A different way of thinking about conflict
Perhaps the biggest shift that mediation asks of organisations is a cultural one: moving from a model in which conflict is seen as a problem to be managed or avoided to one in which it is seen as a signal to do something.
Conflict, at its root, often reflects something real: unclear roles, unmet needs, poor communication, or pressure that has built without being acknowledged. Mediation doesn’t just resolve the immediate dispute, it can unearth the underlying issues, and in doing so, help organisations become healthier and more resilient, creating lasting change.
TARA Mediation provides professional mediation services to workplaces, including charities and not-for-profit organisations. To find out more, visit www.taramediation.co.uk