Ombuds: Your Company's Best Little-Known Ally
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Your friendly neighborhood Organizational Ombuds is a trusted navigator for an era of accelerated change. We serve organizations and leaders of all types, guiding them through the changing business (and world) landscape, challenging decisions, and sticky “people” situations that inevitably accompany growth.
Executives estimate they lose more than $144,000 per day in time lost to interpersonal conflict, miscommunication, poor decision-making, and more. The flip side is that companies with highly engaged employees are found to have 10%-15% higher profits.
So, the value of an ombuds is much more than resolving destructive conflict when it happens. It’s about helping facilitate and support business to have engaged, high-performing employees who are conflict competent, thus REDUCING the potential for costly conflict and INCREASING the potential for higher profits. And, maybe more importantly, becoming known as an organization with strong core values of respect, civility, and justice.
A source of empowerment
Today’s ombuds:
Empowers individuals and organizations to overcome disputes, conflicts and barriers that stand in the way of reaching their full potential.
Helps organizations make critical decisions for a lasting, positive impact in systemic change, positive culture, and identifying and avoiding risk..
Conducts training, coaching and facilitation for organizations and individuals facing challenges, which may include:
Workplace and employee conflicts
Whistleblowing and compliance issues
Any variety of complaint, conflict or dispute, large and small
How to create responsible, responsive Diversitiy, Harassment, and Discrimination policies
And—our Resologics specialty—helps build a workplace culture where constructive, creative conflict is harnessed to build an exciting environment of innovation, forward momentum, and productivity, and eliminate conflict that end in negative outcomes. This may include:
Diagnostics, coaching and training for teams to develop constructive conflict skills
Organizational culture that is inclusive, civil, and welcomes participation without penalty
Workplace discrimination and harassment policies and procedures
How an ombuds works for you and your people
Our guiding principles set by the International Ombudsman Association (IOA), are: Confidentiality / Neutrality / Informality / and Independence. This means (excepting cases of potential for future physical harm to anyone or requirements by court or law):
Anyone involved in the organization, no matter the position or level, has the ability to come to us with an issue, knowing that we’ll exercise these principles.
We don’t talk with anyone (not even our families) about the individual unless we have their permission.
We don’t take any action without the individual’s express permission.
We help facilitate options for our clients, whether individuals, team, or leaders, to identify, head off, and resolve issues or concerns at the earliest possible stage. The issues might be:
Early intervention is disputes between two team members.
Discrimination, harassment, bullying or other unethical behaviors reported in the workplace.
Desire for transparency to increase credibility and accessibility.
Improve team dynamics and communication during the scaling process of adding employees.
Procedures or practices that aren’t meeting the organization’s needs and in need of an upgrade.
Issues or misunderstandings in the chain of command (top-down or bottom-up).
Available on-site or off-site, we are on call and ready to support our open relationship with all members of the organization, individually or in teams. All communications are “off the record” and offered as an informal adviser with no decision-making power - just a valuable support mechanism, safety net, and trusted adviser to help leadership build a workplace culture where constructive, creative conflict is harnessed to bring out the best in your teams and organization.
Talk to us about how this valuable relationship begins.
When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.
What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.