The word of the year? ‘Unprecedented’. You said it.

Oh, and the phrase of the year? It has to be, ‘You’re on mute!’

But how about some of our conflict and mediation moments of the year? Here we go with our annual round-up of the stand-out conflict stories of the year!

Rise in neighbour conflicts because of people working from home

So, back in March we were told firstly not to go to the pub, and secondly, that the pubs would be closed anyway and that we had to all go and work from home.

Those of us used to going into the office every day discovered a whole new world: what our flats, houses and neighbourhoods look, and sound, like between 9.00 and 5.00 on weekdays. There’s the upstairs neighbour’s dog barking, the other neighbour doing a bit of DIY, someone blasting music out at 2.00 in the afternoon, and worst of all, people having gatherings in their houses & gardens in clear breach of the lockdown restrictions.

Unsurprisingly, here at UK Mediation we got an uptick in the number of calls about neighbourhood conflict: not least because people calling their council, local police or CAB tended to get directed our way. A lot of conversations were had with callers irate at their neighbours: we would be sympathetic, of course, and at the same time needed to reinforce with people that no, we can’t just go round and tell your neighbour to shut up!

This was quite a media-friendly topic, as you can imagine, and I did a radio interview about this back in June, especially thinking about how to speak to your neighbours if they disturb you or if you think they are breaching lockdown rules. This led into a contribution to a newspaper piece, including (inevitably) some top tips for communicating assertively with your neighbours when things get shaky.

Increase in online mediation cases and online mediation training

If you had asked me in February what I thought about online mediation and training, I would have at least raised an eyebrow. But with necessity being the mother of invention and all that, we knuckled down in March and, like more providers, are now almost exclusively working on Zoom (or MS Teams, if needs be).

Interestingly, some mediation cases have come our way since lockdown because we are working online: situations where the disputing parties would not entertain getting in a room together, but who are happy enough to meet on a screen. Also, people are realising that because we can get good results this way, team mediations are taking place where team members are all over the country (or other countries) and can engage with mediation without having to leave their desks.

We have made our main accredited qualification into a blended course: three days online and three days face-to-face, and this is proving really popular. And we are sticking to our guns that you do need the face-to-face element of the course: learning interactional skills, dialogue-building, empathic responding, conversation management etc, etc, all do really require that the trainees and the mediator-trainer are in the room together.