Team Facilitations: An Additional Service Offering for Mediators

Team Facilitations are a service that Mediators can offer

Elizabeth Rosa August 2026

Have you ever been approached by the referring manager of an organisation who asks you to conduct a mediation but when they give you more details, you realise they want you to mediate between more than two staff members? For example, it could be a conflict between a manager and their team. The referring manager imagines that you could conduct a mediation where the members of the team all meet together and tell the manager what their concerns are with them. Can you imagine how a manager would feel during this? Like being ganged up on? Any mediator knows that any conflict resolution intervention involves considerations of safety for all concerned.

What do you do if the job you are being asked to do is for a team? Can you do a mediation? Generally, in the workplace mediation space, a mediation is between two people and will involve a discussion of past issues and concerns as well as exploring options for how they could work better together. As a mediation involves discussions of concerns with the other person, it’s quite an intense process. For a team, we don’t want a process where several team members are pointing out concerns to one member in particular. That would be way too intense.

What can a mediator offer as a conflict resolution process? A mediator could offer a Team Facilitation. This will involve the team and manager talking only of the future, as to how the team could work better together as a whole. It won’t involve pointing out the flaws or otherwise of one person or indeed of any of the team members. It would be a positive and future focused process. Yes, of course some negativity may be there but as the process is a focus on the big picture, negative comments would be in regard to the team experience as a whole and issues with the team reaching its peak productivity. The ground rules of the process request that the staff members do not “have a go” at anyone.

The steps in a team facilitation focus on having the staff identify what are the important features of the hypothetical ideal team. Staff usually mention concepts like collaboration, communication and support. This is helpful as the staff all hear each other articulate these ideals. Ultimately, the Team Facilitation involves the staff creating a Team Charter. The charter identifies which concepts of an ideal team they would like for their team. It also identifies action points that are needed to strengthen the team, improve communication and ensure that all have access to the information and processes they need. It may also clarify the parameters of staff roles as well as goals for the collective work of the team.

The beauty of a Team Facilitation is that each staff member has an opportunity to speak and be heard on their ideas to strengthen the team, as well as important values and goals. They will all have the benefit of hearing each other’s ideas. Just being in the room all together helps build team cohesion as many team members often don’t see much of each other in the office these days with many working from home. I have worked with teams who only have one common day in the office or no common day at all. A Team Facilitation is a vehicle to give all staff a voice to contribute to ideas as to future ways of working to foster team harmony and productivity.

For a mediator’s practice, having skills in conducting Team Facilitations is extremely useful as it can be an additional service offering. They are usually bigger jobs than mediations, for example, a Team Facilitation for a group of six would be around twenty hours, including initial individual meetings with the staff members and administrative time arranging the logistics. Also, it is a service offering that can be proactive rather than reactive. In other words, mediators get approached when there is a need for a mediation. For Team Facilitations, a mediator may do the approaching: contact an organisation to offer this as a service for teams going through times of change, conflict or adjusting to hybrid ways of working. For a large organisation, there may be at least one or more teams who fit this description.

The process of Team Facilitation really works. I have conducted many Team Facilitations for a variety of organisations and they have in most cases really lifted the team, with the staff starting to talk more to each other and to communicate well for their work interactions to achieve the goals of the organisation. This progress and improvement has been to the great relief and often to the surprise of the executive managers.

Elizabeth Rosa is an AMDRAS Mediator and a Fellow of the Resolution Institute. She is also a Trainer, Coach, Supervisor and Assessor. Elizabeth offers training on Team Facilitations.