Our Negotiation Programs Empowered Individuals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Olivia Lei, Negotiation Works’ Program and Evaluation Coordinator  

Graphics by Ryann Schutt, Negotiation Works’ 2021 Summer Intern

We recently evaluated the impact of the negotiation strategies programming we provided during the pandemic, and our data has yielded some exciting results! Program participants are learning new ways to negotiate their disputes and are using effective negotiation strategies to achieve positive results in all aspects of their lives. 

Since March 2020, Negotiation Works and its participants have learned to adapt to Zoom courses and remote interactions, continuing to explore the relational nature of negotiation in a virtual format. We are proud to report that we provided our programming without interruption, even increasing our overall services compared to the previous year. Since March 2020, Negotiation Works has taught 17 multi-week courses and 4 stand-alone workshops over Zoom at six different sites around the DMV, serving a total of 210 participants. 

As Negotiation Works continues to adapt and improve its programming, we are constantly evaluating the effectiveness of our courses. We administer surveys and “quick checks” within our curriculum, meaning that we analyze participants’ knowledge and negotiation tendencies both before and after taking our program. This allows us to identify changes in how the participants deal with conflict, advocate for themselves, and navigate relationships with friends, family, employers, landlords, and others. We’ve compiled some of our latest data findings—preliminary results from our Zoom courses—to share the impact that our program has had on the daily lives of the participants.

For the majority of our multi-week classes, our data showed a statistically significant increase in participants’ knowledge of core negotiation concepts. Participants were more likely to give correct answers to questions testing their grasp of basic negotiation ideas and strategies after taking the course, compared to before. Additionally, from the beginning to the end of the course, participants became empowered to respond to conflict proactively and effectively rather than by escalating the situation or avoiding the issues. Studies show that individuals who have experienced significant trauma often struggle when navigating conflicts, reverting into “fight or flight” reactions. In the negotiation context, a “fight” reaction is associated with a competitive or escalating response, and a “flight” reaction is associated with a conflict-avoiding response. 

With the “fight or flight” theory in mind, we analyzed how participants responded to open-ended questions about two scenarios posed to them on both the first and the last day of each course. We categorized their responses to the questions according to typical negotiation approaches identified in the literature as either avoidant, accommodating, competitive, or collaborative.  One scenario, for example, involves a landlord-and-tenant dispute in which the rent is due but the landlord has failed to make necessary repairs. Participants were asked what they would do if they were in the tenant’s shoes. Typical ‘fight’ or competitive approaches that we saw included answers such as “take them to court,” while responses like “I would continue to pay my rent and I would keep calling my landlord hoping that they would do their job and eventually fix the problem” pointed to more avoidant/accommodating (or ‘flight’) approaches.  On the other hand, collaborative—or problem-solving—approaches showcased more effective communication and a desire to satisfy both parties, proposing solutions such as: “ask for a meeting to discuss what is appropriate and what isn't.” 

Overall, across both scenarios--the landlord-and-tenant scenario and a family dispute--we saw a 19% decrease in the number of participants who utilized accommodating/avoidant approaches and a 11% decrease in those who used competing strategies. At the same time, we saw a 37% increase in the participants who used a more purely collaborative approach by the end of the program. These results suggest that while program participants might initially be inclined—whether due to past trauma or other reasons—to walk away from conflicts or “give in” to demands from others, after they have gone through the negotiation program, they are empowered to approach conflicts proactively, productively, and collaboratively. 

These changes in negotiation approaches and knowledge have had a tangible impact on how participants deal with conflict in their daily interactions with friends, work, and family. We ask the participants each week if they are using the negotiation strategies they learn in class in their own lives. An overwhelming majority (around 84%) of the participants who respond affirmatively also report that they are achieving positive outcomes to their situations.

Finally, almost 90% of participants state that they will use what they learned in the course to help them work out solutions to everyday problems and situations. We are thrilled to report that the participants who go through our program are not only learning valuable skills, but they are also feeling confident applying those strategies in future situations.