Remote mediation is a versatile method used by family mediators to work around clients’ careers, locations and personal circumstances.
Marcia Mediation have offered this option for many years, allowing us to schedule mediation to avoid clashes with participants’ work and childcare commitments.
It was also a crucial way for us to keep in touch with clients throughout the pandemic, which has also made many more people familiar with long-distance communications like Skype and Zoom webcam conferences, on top of FaceTime and conventional phone calls.
We continue to schedule remote mediation sessions with health-conscious clients who want to minimise in-person interactions, as well as for a host of other reasons.
Almost anyone can benefit from remote mediation. It’s not a second-best option and there’s no reason to think that less progress will be made during a remote mediation session.
Some examples of why you might choose remote mediation include:
Following a separation, often one party will move a long distance before divorce proceedings have completed (or even before they have begun).
Long-distance mediation allows progress to be made in such cases, using remote mediation methods to get all participants ‘in the room’ in the virtual sense, with the mediator present to facilitate discussions.
In some challenging cases, participants need to negotiate directly but may not want to be physically in the same room as one another.
Remote mediation is a good way to do this, and zero-contact mediation can also safeguard participants’ personal details, such as a new address or telephone number that you do not want to reveal.
As mentioned above, remote mediation can be particularly effective for working parents, to fit around your career and childcare commitments.
Marcia Mediation even offer out-of-hours mediation sessions which can take place remotely, so you can log on to the call after your child has gone to bed and you can talk freely.
Remote mediation is really any mediation session delivered over distance, instead of in one room (or two rooms, in the case of shuttle mediation). This can be as simple as holding your initial Mediation Information & Assessment Meeting (MIAM) over the phone.
As your case proceeds, you can use a mix of in-person and remote mediation, or it may be appropriate to complete the entire process remotely.
Some of the available methods include:
We support all major webcam conferencing apps e.g. Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and we can help you to get set up if you’ve never made or joined a call before.
We believe strongly in the benefits of remote mediation and at Marcia Mediation, we have embraced these technologies since long before the pandemic began – it just took lockdown for many others to recognise the convenience and flexibility of telephone and webcam mediation.
If you have any questions or you want to check whether remote mediation would be a suitable technique in your case (along with alternatives like shuttle mediation) please don’t hesitate to ask.
As mentioned, we can also offer remote MIAM sessions, so if you’re struggling to fit a mandatory MIAM into your busy schedule, please call or email us when you can and we’ll be happy to fit you in.
If you have any questions, call us on 0161 425 3940 or fill out this form
