Regardless of how well-organized your business is, employee conflict is a simply inevitable thing. At some point, your employees will succumb to the pressure of working on a demanding project, and conflict is bound to happen. While this is something that all companies go through, you should not leave it untreated.
Since we live in a world of digital technology and advancement, overcoming such an obstacle is easy. However, the business environment is driven by success, and your company culture plays a significant role in conflict management.
Maintaining a good company culture results in higher productivity and a happier workforce. So, let’s see how capable conflict management boosts your company culture.
Identify Issues Before They Escalate
According to some statistics, a happy and satisfied employee tends to be 12% more productive than unsatisfied workers who tend to be 10% less productive. However, don’t make a mistake in believing that higher productivity is unnecessarily related to a happy workplace.
Conflicts tend to happen; that’s just the nature of things. It’s how you manage and solve them that counts. While conflicts make for a natural part of the worker lifecycle, they stem from an array of issues such as organizational mismanagement, miscommunication, and personality clashes.
The best way to keep things under control is to recognize, identify, and solve workplace issues efficiently before they escalate. You can do that by creating a mechanism with the primary goal to resolve negativity and conflict as early as possible.
If you leave any conflict untreated and unaddressed, it can lead to absenteeism, high staff turnover, decreased productivity, and complete project failure. Company culture is one of the essential parts of your problem-solving mechanism.
It is what ensures the employees of your organizational conflict resolution capabilities, enabling and encouraging them to solve problems before they go beyond their control. With all this in mind, let’s see what steps you can take to address employee conflict and improve their satisfaction.
Understand the Scope of the Conflict
There are two ways to address workplace issues. The first one includes notifying your HR department to make sure they are familiar with all the details. Then, they initiate the process for managing employee relations.
HR departments are familiar with the most common ER problems, such as long-term sick, disciplinary, and grievance. The HR professionals use all available data to spot patterns and trends in employee behavior, thus, getting the advantage of preventing expensive employment tribunals.
There is also an option to consider using an HR case management solution. It involves providing a series of actions according to the company’s HR policy to make sure that your organization stays ahead of all the steps required to solve the issue promptly and with minimal repercussions.
This is why it’s essential to monitor all issues in real-time to maintain a healthy and positive company culture. There is a tremendous advantage that comes from this – an increased level of transparency and visibility allows you to provide accurate and immediate feedback on performance, attendance, etc.
Improve Collaboration and Communication
Improving collaboration and communication is the most effective way to conquer any obstacles and resolve any conflicts that might be keeping your business from thriving. Having a valid system in place is vital for providing HR teams with all necessary information, and it can also serve as the central storage of data.
You should also consider online courses. They can do a lot of maintaining a healthy company culture and identifying issues at the earliest stages. Aside from all this, online courses also come with a wide range of assessment tools that can improve your employees’ collaboration and communication skills.
The TKI package contains three TKI courses that can help you accelerate your conflict management and resolution skills. This can also improve the time it takes for you to resolve a conflict.
The quicker you do it, the less painful it is for you and your employees. Also, timely issue resolution saves cost and effort that could be invested elsewhere. Finally, your employees will feel a lot better if they can see that the management is doing everything within their power to solve the issues at hand.
Conclusion
The culture of your company should promote fairness, discussion, transparency, and honesty. There are no exceptions; everyone deserves fair treatment. Every company deals with inner conflicts regularly, but it’s how they deal with these issues that really counts in the end.
It all comes down to developing a strategy that encourages the culture of your company and conflict resolutions. If your employees know they can count on you to help them out in their time of need, they are far less likely to engage in conflicts between each other in the first place.