Average time required is about eight hours. We are a culture of avoidance, and avoidance only works if you're not going to have to deal with this person again. An arbitrator listens to both sides and makes a decision, but a mediator gets people to work out their own solutions. Peter Shedd, a professor in the Terry College of Business, is also on the task force. A grievance settles the dispute but doesn't solve the conflict.
Mediation settles what people expect to do in the future.
As far as we can determine, no other higher education system is as far along. Many large corporations and the federal government include mediation as a tool for resolving conflict. Leed says that preliminary figures from the postal service suggest that mediations cost about one-tenth as much as grievances, take much less time to resolve and significantly decrease the number of grievances filed. Since mediation is only an alternative if trained mediators are available, the University System has absorbed part of the cost of training new mediators, who take 20 hours of classroom training followed by mentoring with an experienced mediator. Businesses and governments that have adopted a mediation program have reported a significant jump in the number of mediation cases after two or three years, when word about the effectiveness of the approach has begun to spread, and the task force has been concerned to make sure enough mediators will be available at that point.