The organizational ombudsman model has been widely embraced for many years by colleges, universities, and progressive corporations as an important resource to ensure that students and employees have a neutral, confidential, informal resource available to assist when issues or conflict arise. In these times of crisis and change, the ombuds resource becomes an even more valuable resource.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In unsteady times, the fundamental design of ombuds makes its services adaptable and agile. The ombuds design tenets of confidentiality and informality make ombuds a good resource for informal connection though phone, video conferencing, and other distance-based formats. Ombuds are deeply experienced and adept at developing creative solutions to novel situations. This skill can be particularly useful in crisis situations where there are no established and proven approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the current pandemic crisis presents fresh challenges without pre-existing responses or methods, other crisis situations serve to illustrate how the basic attributes of the ombuds model, combined with its agility and adaptability, can provide an important resource for the population the ombuds serves. For example, catastrophic wildfire event occurred, which closed the ombuds\u2019 work organization\u2014a large national laboratory with over 15,000 workers \u2013 and forced the evacuation of an entire city. Because of its flexibility and adaptability, the Ombuds Office was identified as the point of contact to ensure that visitors and foreign nationals understood what was going on and had resources and a safe place to stay during the event. While other operations were closed, the Ombuds Office was designated as an essential function and was identified as a resource to ensure that all workers understood what was happening and the resources available to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In today\u2019s evolving situation, the ombuds office continues to be a safe place<\/strong> to seek information and to report concerns. While ombuds are not typically designated to provide medical, psychological, or legal advice, ombuds are nonetheless highly skilled with helping people deal with an extremely wide array of personal concerns, regardless of the presenting situation. During a crisis, emotional issues, and reactive and potentially negative behaviors can surface. Even when operating in a \u201cvirtual\u201d environment, the ombuds creates a zone of psychological safety to provide a \u201csafe space\u201d where a person can be heard and can speak up without fear of reprisal or negative consequences. Ombuds are skilled at helping people become self-aware and providing them with options and more productive approaches. Once concerns and feelings are expressed, people often take the next steps to move in productive directions toward resolution of the conflict or concerns at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The organizational ombuds also serves as a valuable resource to leaders. Because of their widespread work and in-depth communications, ombuds can provide organizational leaders essential information and feedback concerning how people are perceiving and reacting to a crisis situation. Ombuds can serve as an important resource to enable leaders the headspace necessary to focus on crisis response. Ombuds can make referrals to appropriate resources that might otherwise create loads and leadership, and can serve as important communication resource, offering information about company actions, and new or changed policies or processes. All of these activities can readily be performed in a \u201cvirtual environment\u201d and with \u201conline visitors.\u201d Beyond relieving leadership of added communication burdens, the enhanced communication ombuds can provide, can reduce the level of fear from the uncertainty in the community served. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The ombuds can also serve as a valuable conduit of information by sharing information and suggestions received in while providing ombuds services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In today\u2019s situation, the organizational ombuds can work to help leadership address the demands of the situation using proven tools. To help people address today\u2019s challenges, the organizational ombuds can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today\u2019s crisis will eventually end. How we come through the crisis and how we emerge from it on the other side can be strongly affected by the tools and approaches that we use to collectively work past the challenges. The organizational ombuds can be a very valuable tool in these circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The organizational ombudsman model has been widely embraced for many years by colleges, universities, and progressive corporations as an important resource to ensure that students and employees have a neutral, confidential, informal resource available to assist when issues or conflict arise. In these times of crisis and change, the ombuds resource becomes an even more…<\/span><\/p>\nBruce MacAllister,
Ombuds Program Director,
International Foundation for Online Responsibility
and
Diany Mosonyl,
Founder and Executive Director
Hungarians Organizational Ombudsman Association<\/em><\/strong><\/pre>\n\n\n\n