The conflict has been resolved (Getty Image)
Feeling like the parent of your office is not a fun position to find yourself in as the owner of a small business. It does happen, though. Team members have disagreements, and finding solutions for settling those employee squabbles often falls on you. Calling for a timeout isn’t exactly an option, right?
In situations involving battling employees, you likely need to utilize conflict resolution strategies and techniques to keep the workplace calm and productive. Here’s some background and tips for activating those practices within your operation.
What is conflict resolution?
Conflict resolution conceptualizes methods and processes to facilitate a peaceful ending of conflicts and retributions. Put more bluntly, it's a way for two or more parties to find a peaceful solution to a disagreement. These disputes may be personal, emotional, financial, or even political. When these sorts of feuds arise in the workplace, the best course of action often is a negotiated resolution to the underlying disagreement(s).
Recognize the problem and then act.
Employees have needs and own certain expectations as they operate in the workplace. Conflicts can and often do occur when those needs and expectations either aren’t met or are perceived as being ignored. True conflict resolution should occur before a conflict, i.e., conflict avoidance.
Primary sources of conflict in the workplace include:
- Poor management
- Unclear job roles
- Inadequate training
- Poor communication
- Poor work environment
- Lack of equal opportunities
- Bullying and harassment
Additional causes of workplace conflict:
- Personality clashes. Disruption occurs when a new team member is introduced to a stable mixture of personalities.
- Unrealistic expectations. Workplace conflicts can be instigated when leadership sets unrealistic goals or ignores employee needs. For example, arranging work hours in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for employees to attend to childcare responsibilities.
- Business fairness. Employees undoubtedly have a definition of basic fairness, and an organization's procedures and policies should reflect those ideals.
- Unresolved workplace issues. An employee might bring an important procedural glitch impacting production to management. If the issue is ignored, resentment could grow.
- Increase in workload. Workplace conflicts can occur when employees feel their workload is unmanageable or the effort that they are putting forth is unappreciated.
Actionable strategies for achieving workplace tranquility
Identify the origin of the conflict. The more information you have about the cause of the conflict, the more easily you can help to resolve it. Each of us owns biased fairness perceptions. Both parties to a conflict typically think they're right (and the other side is wrong) because they can't get out of their heads. To get the necessary information, use a series of questions to identify the cause, like, "When did you feel upset?" "Do you see a relationship between that and this incident?" "How did this incident begin?"
Look beyond the conflict and avoid escalating tensions. Often, it is not the situation but the perspective that causes anger and ultimately leads to visible evidence of a conflict, like shouting. The source of the conflict might be a minor problem that occurred months before, but the stress level has grown to the point where the two parties have begun attacking each other personally instead of addressing the real problem.
Remember that a minor conflict can escalate into a major one if either side feels their point of view is not being considered. When one side feels ignored or steamed, they try to regain control by threatening them. For example, they may say they’ll take a dispute to court or try to ruin the other party's business reputation. There's a time and place for litigation, but threats and other attention-getting moves, such as take-it-or-leave-it offers, are often a mistake. People tend to respond to threats in kind, thus worsening the conflict.
Invite both parties to offer solutions. After getting each party's viewpoint on the conflict, the next step is to get each to identify how the situation could be changed. Question the parties to solicit their ideas. As the mediator, you must be an active listener, aware of every verbal nuance, and aware of every verbal nuance, as well as a good reader of body language. Just listen. You want to get the disputants to stop fighting and start cooperating, steering the discussion away from finger-pointing and toward ways of resolving the conflict. In most conflicts, each combatant tends to have an inaccurate understanding of each other's views and to see the other's positions as more extreme than they are.
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BBB Great West + Pacific contributed to this article.