Final Report on Union & Management negotiations

Q1. Some of our best strategic moves were: 1. Building trust early in round 1 negotiation: We had realized that it is extremely critical in multi-round negotiations that trust-building is of paramount importance. Hence, right from the beginning we concentrated on clarifying our stance and the reasoning behind it. Also, we communicated early in our negotiations that we were ready to consider alternative arrangement and package deals that would work for the benefit of both Management and Union. This open stance created a collaborative environment 2. Being collaborative: In both round-1 and round-2, we could sense that Management had the upper hand and we could have adopted distributive tactics to squeeze out a larger chunk of the pie. But, we understood that taking advantage of the stronger position would only fire back in future negotiations and hence we pushed for more collaborative negotiations 3. Prepared with our planning document for each round: Throughout the negotiation exercise, we were always prepared with our planning document before entering any negotiation session and had the details of the deal accessible for quick reference. The planning document helped us immensely while seeking alternative solutions or package deals to resolve deadlocks. It also helped us greatly in justifying out stance and we could offer the economic or managerial facts in our discussions more often and at right time. 4. Building personal connections with some union members: At several points of time during our negotiations, we were able to reach out to specific members of the Union and seek heir direct support for our stance. This was possible, because of earlier trust building efforts. This helped us resolve a “No Deal” situation in

Round-2 negotiations, when few Union members were adamant on not arriving at any deal