MELBOURNE LEAN IN EVENT – THE NEGOTIATION AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN OFFICE

At the beginning, I would like to said that this event has a very interesting topic and the discussion panel was revealed many dark parts in the office environment that I had never know before, especially about sexual harassment. And the slogan is also very inspired

“Empower women to achieve their ambitions“.

In the first part of this event, we focused on the negotiation in the business environment, especially about the negotiation for the women role in the office. To be more specific, from the data of “Melbourne lean it”, I knew that the discrimination in gender is still a big gap, not only in developing nations but also in the developed nations such as UK, US or Australia.

In general, the data revealed that the women usually received less than 46% compared to their male colleagues. It is a huge gap and requires a long term to solve this issue in global sphere.

Therefore, the question how to reduce this gap and how women can have a good negotiation with their boss were received many concerns. And as far as we discusses, we agreed that there are several things that each person need to consider if they want to win in the negotiation games, includes:

• Have a clear objective: You can not win a game if you even don’t recognize what is the final result you would like to receive from it. Therefore, a clear objective is very important if you want to be a winner in the negotiation. It could be higher salary, a good contract or a simply a discount for your stuff. Everything need to have a clear vision what you really want as the final goal.
• Be careful about your email for negotiation: Many people nowadays use their email to connect before having a face to face conversation. However, in many cases, the wrong in expression your ideas could cause negative effect and make the negotiation to be failed, So, we recommend that you should carefully check your email content before sending and should be sent later 1 day from the day you create the contents. It will give you the time to rethinking about what should have and haven’t in your email.
• Framing the question: It means that “DON’T BE SHY”. If you can not understand any features of the negotiation contents, just ask the question “Why?” and you can ask until when you completely understand the fully meaning of the contents.

Moreover, if you would like to have a negotiation with your boss about yourself benefit. We suggest that the monetary benefit should be considered as the final point.

The reason is many young people usually use the salary as a standard for their success. However, following many psychology research, the real value doesn’t come from the money; it comes from:

• The colleagues relationship
• The working environment
• The adaption with company culture

If you can recognize all these value from your organization, you shouldn’t asking for the negotiation about salary at this moment. Because the spiritual values and others are higher and can create a long term value compared to the salary.