AVISAN Solutions
AVISAN Solutions
About Avisan Solutions
Avisan (ah-vee-san)
verb (sp): to advise
With over sixty-years of combined management and union experience, Luis Sanchez and Al Avila founded Avisan Solutions to provide California's higher education and K-12 institutions with support for collective bargaining, conflict resolution, workplace culture, leadership support, and other labor relations matters.
Avisan's partners are trained in and have experience in Traditional/Positional Bargaining, Interest-Based Bargaining/Getting to Yes methods for negotiations. The partners know the strengths and short-comings of each firsthand and incorporate only the most effective aspects of each into our own methodology, theTrust First Method. The Trust First Method focuses on the symbiotic relationship between management and unions to build trust and ensure that neither side is subjected to a "slight-of-hand" maneuver or suffers from "buyer's remorse" after the agreement is ratified.
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The services Avisan provides assist employers and unions as they navigate the challenges of negotiations and labor relations. Avisan offers pre-bargaining training, facilitation and mediation during bargaining, and on-going support after ratification.
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The Avisan methods are designed to build trust and respect within and between the management and union teams to improve workplace culture and employee morale.
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Services Provided
Avisan Solutions provides services to assist managers and employee union leadership with collective bargaining, workplace culture and morale, conflict resolution, and leadership support.
The Avisan method develops a collaborative partnership that focuses on trust first and understanding the symbiotic relationship between management and the bargaining units.
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Avisan provides customized services:
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Collective Bargaining training, facilitation, and mediation
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Workplace culture and morale strategies
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Conflict resolution and mediation
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​Management and union leadership support
Trust-First Collective Bargaining Strategies
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Collective bargaining is perhaps the single most important event that has a direct impact on the culture and morale of the organization. No college administrator is shielded from the wrath of a collective bargaining process gone awry. No union is shielded from internal conflict arising from members who feel alienated by a perceived unfair agreement. No institution is shielded from the effects on employee morale arising from tensions when negotiations are near or at an impasse.
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A clearly expressed and well-defined collective bargaining agreement is essential to all parties affected by its terms and conditions. It is the official playbook for working conditions and, as such, impacts the overall health and well-being of the institution it serves.
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What differentiates Avisan from other consulting firms is our "Socratic-Mediatory" approach to bargaining that focuses on trust and reduces the fear of “giving away too much” or “leaving too much on the table.” Avisan’s five-step process includes:
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Pre-bargaining team-building, training, and support
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Writing effective ground rules and proposals
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Facilitating bargaining sessions
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Providing mediation during bargaining
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Providing post-bargaining support
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Workplace Culture and Morale
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One thing that differentiates Avisan from other consulting firms in addressing workplace culture concerns is our Group Response Institutional Diagnostic (GRID) method. We don’t just survey. We don’t just talk. We meet with employee groups in a structured format to get to the heart of the issues and develop detailed solutions for managers that build trust and improve morale. We are hands-on and committed to provide institutional support, even after we leave your site.
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Conflict Resolution Methodologies
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Community colleges face unprecedented employment related challenges today, ranging from petty complaints to serious conflicts. Many community colleges turn to law firms or in-house counsel to handle personnel conflicts, complaints, grievances and the collective bargaining process, due to fear of litigation. However, most legal counsel are not practitioners nor experienced in managing personnel. Their approach to problems is pragmatic and the consequence is that employee engagement and morale are often overlooked in the interest of "litigation avoidance".
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The Avisan partners bring many years of practical and legal experience to help managers and unions avoid pitfalls when dealing with employee conflicts and grievances. The partners provide a fair and impartial mediation process. Whatever problem you are facing, we most likely have experienced something similar or have knowledge of instances where it has occurred and can facilitate the application of real-world workable solutions.
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Leadership Support
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Avisan provides training, mentorship and advice services to help supervisors, managers, executive officers, and union officers navigate the challenges of their roles.
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Most leadership training programs provide textbook-style information in a format that occurs in a lecture-based setting. This approach occurs outside the necessary context for the application of learning and skill development. That is why managers who are sent through a management training program often are lost when later faced with an employee incident.
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Avisan leadership workshops provide real world interactive scenarios for the student to develop and hone skills for conflict de-escalation strategies.
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Service Areas
AVISAN serves California's education institutions and their recognized bargaining units.
Meet the Partners
The Avisan Solutions partners met more than a decade ago across the table from one another as adversaries. Al was the chief negotiator representing the college’s faculty which had just come off a highly contentious impasse. Luis was the newly hired vice-president and assigned as the chief negotiator representing the college administration.
Luis’ background as an academic dean and faculty member at another community college and Al’s background in administration in law enforcement helped bridge gaps that had previously existed. Both were able to understand the perspectives of the other and both understood the importance of transparency and trust, which lead to respect.
Together they were able to formulate strategies to develop mutual respect between the members of the management negotiating team and members of the union negotiating team. Luis and Al have remained friends despite moving on in their respective careers and have now joined forces to bring their lessons learned to help public entities build trust and respect in the workplace and in the bargaining process.
