Employee Conflict Resolution Best Practices

Businesses bring together many people with diverse backgrounds. This means employee conflicts are likely to happen at some point. Your practices for employee conflict resolution will determine how much impact these conflicts have on your workplace environment.

If not handled well, employee conflict can disrupt overall company productivity and can lead to further disruption given the nature of other individual employees’ tendency to take sides.

If handled well, these conflicts can lead to improved engagement, enhanced creativity and innovation, and a healthy workplace culture ready to embrace diversity and new ideas.

Common Issues that Result in Conflict

Most conflict in the workplace results from employees disagreeing about how to best address a project, task, or work-related issue. These disagreements can be due to many factors.

Incompatible Priorities

When it comes to completing work, different people in your company will have different or competing priorities. Conflict can arise when these priorities clash between two or more people. In these instances, each person has a different priority, such as goals, methods, or resources required to complete tasks.

Promotions can also lead to conflicts. When someone is promoted, they may make changes based on their priorities, which can conflict with understood priorities for the team going through these changes.

Differing Perspectives

Your employees are all going to have different life experiences. This means you have different backgrounds coming together in one place, bringing their unique perspectives, guiding principles, and ethics to address workplace needs.

It is almost inevitable that these different perspectives can lead to conflict when people are working together regularly.

Misinterpreting Intentions

Because of the diverse backgrounds of your employees, they will come to work with pre-conceived ideas of the intentions behind other people’s actions. This can lead to conflict when one employee reacts to another based on an assumption of bad intentions.

Conflict Avoidance

Some people prefer to deal with issues immediately, while others tend to avoid conflict whenever possible. This can cause issues when the different types of personalities come together.

People who try to avoid conflict can be prone to blow-ups if they try to hold onto issues for too long rather than deal with things as they come up, creating additional risk.

Potential Consequences of Not Dealing with Conflict

Employee conflicts don’t just affect the employees involved. If you do not have policies in place to manage employee conflict resolution, you are likely to see a snowball effect with increased conflicts across the company and possible financial and legal troubles as these conflicts continue.

Such issues include increased absenteeism, claims of a hostile work environment or harassment, an overall lack of trust in leadership or human resources, and attrition. If employees feel uncomfortable in the workplace or if they feel burnt out, employee absences can increase. If conflicts go on, this will lead some employees to leave altogether or feel they need to file claims of harassment.

Increased absenteeism, turnover, and workplace complaints can put a financial strain on your company through loss of production and attorney fees to address those employees who feel they only have recourse to legal options to deal with their workplace issues.

How to Manage Employee Conflict Resolution

To best manage employee conflict resolution, you need to create clear policies for how conflict is dealt with in the workplace. These policies should be clearly understood, and you need to ensure managers are trained in how to deal with conflict based on your policies.

To develop clear policies, start with the following best practices:

Encourage Communication

Your leadership team should encourage employees to bring concerns forward before they escalate. When possible, encourage employees to discuss conflicts and find resolutions directly with the other person with whom they have the conflict.

Communicate with employees, if they do not feel comfortable discussing the issue with the other individual(s) involved, to bring the concern to you. When dealing with a concern, actively listen to the issues addressed, and make sure you fully understand the conflict before moving forward.

You want to get to the root of the issue. Determine where the conflict started, whether it was a miscommunication, misinterpretation, personality clash, or some other issue.

Remember that everyone involved is working toward the same goal. Ask questions and make sure it is not a more serious issue such as harassment or discrimination.

Facilitate Discussions

Part of understanding the conflict is giving all people involved a chance to air their grievances or share their understanding of the conflict. Whenever possible, speak to all parties involved together and provide an opportunity to resolve the issues.

When facilitating a meeting between employees who have a conflict, set out ground rules for treating everyone with respect. Encourage the involved parties to ask questions and ensure they understand what others involved have said about the conflict. Have them restate what the other person has said to show they understand.

Summarize the Issues

Once everyone has had their chance to share their side, give a summary of the conflict in question. Share what you have understood and ask any necessary clarifying questions to make sure you have everything clear.

Give everyone a chance to agree or provide further insights to make sure everyone is on the same page. While you want to give everyone a chance to be understood, you want to make sure this discussion doesn’t get derailed by side issues. Set clear ground rules for any rebuttals.

Work Together to Develop Solutions

Employee conflict resolution requires all parties to agree to the solution. This means you need to work together with everyone involved to come up with a solution to the conflict in question.

Give employees a chance to share their desired outcomes, and work with them to develop a strategy all parties will agree to or accept as a resolution. You will want to follow up at defined intervals, short and long-term, to make sure everyone is following the agreed-upon resolution agreement.

Document All Steps

Documentation is essential to protect your employees and your organization. Keep records of any incidents to help you continue to monitor the situation and support any future issues or claims.

Make notes of what the conflict was about, actions taken, findings, and the resolution agreed to. A good policy is to have all parties involved sign the agreement to show they have understood.

This documentation will also help you identify potentially toxic employee behavior and provide supporting documentation should an employee seek legal or employment law recourse.

Managing Conflicts Improves Company Culture

Creating clear policies for employee conflict resolution goes a long way to improving your overall company culture. This includes providing conflict resolution training and hiring people who will fit in with your company culture in the first place.

Better conflict resolution and better company culture lead to improved productivity and increased company growth. If you need help analyzing your needs for improved culture, contact us to learn about the solutions we can offer for better people management.

Written by: HR Solutions Team and Penny Clark, Marketing Specialist