Let’s Talk: A guide to resolving workplace conflicts (pdf 3807 KB)

Here are six important steps to remember the next time you have to resolve an employee disagreement.

1. Listen to all parties in order to get the facts. Listen to how they feel, what they want, and how they have arrived at the present impasse.
2. Remain objective. Letting people express their feelings and opinions will disperse stress and will help move the process forward. Keep those involved focused on the present situation, not old grievances, history or grudges. The objective of resolving conflict is to gather as much information as possible. As a manager you draw the parties into the process so that they feel connected.
3. Ask questions: What is required to resolve the disagreement? Are they willing to discuss it? Are they able to see each other’s point of view?

   Help them get to the root cause. You will be unable to resolve the conflict without understanding the cause. If appropriate, refer employees back to company procedures and policies or job responsibilities, as behaviour guidelines.

   Giving feedback is easy when it’s positive. We tend to shy away from giving negative feedback is negative.

4. State the desired outcome. Ask each participant involved in the disagreement for specific suggestions on how to accomplish the desired outcome. The ultimate goal is permanent solutions.
5. Get consensus. Resolution comes by having all parties arrive at a satisfactory agreement. Work through specific solutions until you have consensus.
6. Monitor success of the resolution. Check the progress regularly.

Expectations that are not met, personality clashes, and uncooperative coworkers are among the primary causes of conflict on the job. Without an effective resolution process, a workgroup will not have high success. Developing good conflict resolution skills should be high on the supervisor’s list of priorities.

Consider…

Without the benefits of an effective process for resolving disagreements, job-centred friction will harm relationships and drive people apart. My experience has shown, the most skilled and capable employees will be the first to leave a stressful, conflict ridden workplace. How it would impact your workgroup to have your best people leave in search of peace and harmony somewhere else?

Conflict is a normal part of doing business. People connected to an organization have different goals, values, standards, etc. However, these differences a part of what makes an organization vital by stimulating creativity, promoting innovation, and change. Organizations without conflict are stagnant.

Conflict should not be considered “good” or “bad”. Instead, it should be evaluated from a perspective which takes into consideration the individual and the organization. Resolutions reflecting the mutual interests of the parties involved, are more likely to result in fewer formal grievances, improved morale and more effective use of human resources.

Ideally, conflict resolution occurs while problems are still manageable. Early recognition of conflict is critical. What can be dealt with effectively today may be more difficult to resolve next week.

Conflicts are inevitable; however anger, grudges, hurt and blame do not have to be. Unmanaged conflicts and disagreements harm important work and workplace relationships. Effectively managed conflict promotes cooperation and builds stronger relationships. Most conflicts can be resolved fairly and in a manner beneficial to all concerned.

An effective conflict resolution process unifies by addressing concerns and issues rather than suppressing them. It gets people talking to each other (instead of about each other), and enables people to be part of a team that cares. The process encourages compromise and collaboration as people learn to work together, develop creative solutions and reach mutually beneficial outcomes.

Don’t fight—solve the problem. Conflicts don’t have to be adversarial. Focus on outcomes and not anger. Work relationships will improve, and the overall sense of well-being will strengthen as successful solutions to problems are developed and implemented. The following is a comparison of the benefits of managed conflict and the damage resulting from out-of-control conflict:

• Managed Conflict

• Strengthens relationships and builds teamwork.
• Encourages open communication and cooperative problem-solving.
• Resolves disagreements quickly and increases productivity.
• Deals with real issues and concentrates on win-win resolution.
• Makes allies and diffuses anger.
• Airs all sides of an issue in a positive, supportive environment.
• Calms and focuses toward results.

• Damages relationships and discourages cooperation.
• Results in defensiveness and hidden agendas.
• Wastes time, money and human resources.
• Focuses on fault-finding and blaming.
• Creates enemies and hard feelings.
• Is frustrating, stress producing and energy draining.
• Is often loud, hostile and chaotic.
  

by John H. Fleming, Ph.D., and Jim Asplund Excerpted from Human SIGMA: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, November 2007)

Rule 1: You can’t measure and manage the employee and customer experiences as separate entities. Because you must manage these human systems in tandem, you may need to reorganize.

Rule 2: Emotion frames the employee-customer encounter. It’s important not to think like an economist or an engineer when you’re assessing employee-customer interactions. Emotions, it turns out, inform both sides’ judgments and behavior even more powerfully than rational or dispassionate thinking.

Rule 3: You must measure and manage the employee-customer encounter at a local level. Though companies can manage many kinds of organizational activities effectively from the top down, the employee-customer encounter is an intensely local phenomenon that can vary considerably from location to location within the same company. Because of the variability in local performance, you must measure and manage it locally.

Rule 4: We can quantify and summarize the effectiveness of the employee-customer encounter in a single performance measure — the HumanSigma metric — that is powerfully related to financial performance.

Rule 5: Improvement in local HumanSigma performance requires deliberate and active intervention through attention to a combination of transactional and transformational intervention activities. Measurement by itself is never enough to improve performance. Creating organizational change is hard work and requires active and disciplined intervention.

Five New Rules for Management.

When discussions come around to what it is that makes an excellent workplace, the answer could fill a library. But most of us don’t have time to read hundreds of books. Sure, book summaries are available, and there’s a lot of valuable nuggets in those books. But I also believe that some central truths exist that apply to just about any business.

Ten universal principles of the workplace

My biggest problem with sports metaphors is the concept of team in the workplace. It’s not that I think the idea of team is inherently bad, but rather, it is a weak metaphor.

When I look at teams in the sporting world, it strikes me that teams are more about losing than about winning. The NHL has 30 teams; one wins the Stanley Cup, 29 lose. Major League Baseball has 29 teams; one World Series winner, 28 has beens. The only teams that can experience broad success are those that cross a number of sporting disciplines: such as a country’s Olympic team.

I work with a manager who lives and breathes team. His staff have team meetings and team jackets. They go on team retreats where staff are forced to endure team building exercises. The manager is highly competitive and his department performs consistently well. However, he has the highest staff turnover rate of any of our managers. His employees get tired of the constant pressure to fit the team concept.

I would replace the team metaphor with one of community. There are a number of ways where community works is a better metaphor:

• It’s cross-cultural
• It supports both group and individual endeavour
• It is consensus driven
• It provides common infrastructure
• It is adaptive
• It encourages the highly competitive
• It nurtures and protects the weak
• It rewards effort as well as accomplishment
• and much more

Over the next little while, I’ll post some expanded thoughts on these and other points, and why I think community is a better workplace metaphor.

• Job clarity
• Materials and equipment
• Matching strengths to jobs
• Recognition and praise
• Caring about the people you work with
• Mentoring
• Valuing employee opinions
• Connection to a noble purpose
• All for one, one for all
• “I have a best friend at work”
• Regularly talking about individual progress
• Opportunities to learn and grow

• Five Worst-Case Interview Scenarios – and how to recover from them.
• Twelve Rules for Self-Management – Rosa Say reminds us, before we can presume to manage others, we must learn to manage ourselves. If you want to move your life or career forward, you need to see how you are meeting these 12 rules.
• 10 Ways for HR to Think Different – Challenge ingrained practices.
• Balance: The New Workplace Perk –  Forbes.com adds a piece on work-life balance.
• Five Recommendations for Employee Satisfaction Surveys – Get results you can depend on.
• The Office on NBC: Tell Toby about your HR issues. Did your coworkers pull a prank? Did you experience a Diversity Day gone awry?
• The No Asshole Rule – some quotes from Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule.

1. Introduction
2. First Impressions/Reactions
3. Formatting
4. Content is King
5. Wrap-Up