Employee Relations and Workplace Conflict Management
Conflict exists in every organization and to a certain extent indicates a healthy exchange of ideas and creativity. However, counter-productive conflict can result in decreased employee morale, reduced productivity, poor service to clients, absenteeism and increased employee turnover, increased work-related stress or, worse case scenario, litigation based on claims of harassment, discrimination, or a hostile work environment.
As the need arises, Optimum HR Solutions will help your business navigate through complicated employee issues including progressive discipline, mediation, investigations and terminations. Handling and resolving conflicts that arise in the workplace is one of the biggest challenges managers and employees face, which a lot of the times does not get resolved in a timely and positive effective manner. By learning to constructively resolve conflict, we can turn a potentially destructive situation into an opportunity for creativity and enhanced performance.
There are many causes or reasons for conflict in any work setting. Some of the primary causes are:
- Poor Communication: misunderstandings between employees or between employee and manager.
- Values Conflict: Involves incompatibility of preferences, principles and practices that people believe in such as religion, ethics or politics.
- Power Conflict: Occurs when each party wishes to maintain or maximize the amount of influence that it exerts in the relationship and the social setting such as in a decision making process.
- Organizational Conflict: Involves inequalities in the organizational chart and how employees report to one another.
- Interpersonal Conflict: Occurs when two people or more have incompatible needs, goals, or approaches in their relationship such as different communication or work styles, ignoring organizational goals and objectives.
- Personality Clashes: all work environments are made up of differing personalities, which often results in conflict
- Poor Performance: when individuals are not contributing to the team effort, conflict is inevitable
It is important that you do not avoid the conflict, hoping it will go away. Even conflict that appears to have subsided will most likely reappear whenever stress increases or a new disagreement occurs. Unresolved conflict or interpersonal disagreements fester just under the surface of your work environment.
Optimum HR Solutions will help you figure about where the conflict stems from in order to be better equipped to address it. A variety of factors influence when and how conflict will surface. Together, we will collaboratively consider all the sources above and support your business in working through these employee relations issues in a confidential and professional manner. We will create and implement a solution that will be tailored to diffuse each situation and help you avoid potentially costly repercussions as well as a plan to be proactive to ensure similar conflicts would be prevented in the future.
