What is the cost to your business when you ignore conflict?
Conflict gets a bad rap and most people relate to it as something negative. The reality is that conflict is part of our daily life. It is inevitable and it can have a positive impact on the workplace, but only if it is managed well.
Conflict often gets ignored because people don’t like conflict, they don’t know what to do when faced with it, and we often hope that it will go away if it’s ignored. Unfortunately, it never goes away. More often than not the conflict will bubble under the surface and it will grow and result in a negative impact on the business.
A study in the US found that employees spend 2.8 hours a week dealing with conflict which is equivalent to approximately $350 billion dollars a year in paid hours. These numbers only reflect paid hours, but conflict has a much broader impact.
What will happen when you ignore conflict
When conflict is not managed well employees will start calling in sick or may even leave their job altogether. When conflict arises in a workplace, people are distracted and productivity falls. Often entire teams get affected by the conflict that others have and their productivity and happiness at work is also impacted. Conflict is stressful and can lead to mental health issues. People will take the issues at work home, so often their personal life is impacted as well.
If you are a business owner and you would like to manage conflict well, here are five things that you can do to manage conflict in your business.
1. Deal with conflict early
I often get calls when the situation is at crisis point and it is very hard at that point to salvage the situation. When people don’t get along, deal with it immediately and don’t let the conflict fester.
2. Know how to deal with conflict
We don’t necessarily get taught in life how to deal with conflict and we often don’t like to talk about it or manage it. So, it comes as no surprise that a lot of people do not know how to handle conflict in an effective way. Train yourself and train your staff in conflict resolution skills so there are people in your business who can facilitate a conflict resolution process. If you don’t have the skills required in-house then hire an external mediator to come and facilitate the process.
3. Create a process
Have a process in place for conflict resolution and make sure your staff know about it. Make sure it is a safe process for your employees. When you have a process in place your staff will know that it is important to you and that conflict will be dealt with in your business. If your employees have someone they can talk to and go to with their problems safely, without repercussions, you will be aware of what is going on within your workplace and you can deal with it. If people don’t know what to do or where to go, you might only find out what has been going on when it is too late.
4. Listen
Often when people tell us about something that is not working for them in the workplace we will become defensive and we do not listen. It is empowering when people feel listened to and it makes a big difference, even though you might not be able to solve the problem straight away.
5. Make conflict resolution a priority
Everyone gets busy and putting time and money aside to prevent conflict from happening or festering may feel counterproductive because everything appears okay at the moment and it is not too bad, right? My advice would be to make conflict resolution a priority because if you don’t you might find yourself in a crisis later that has the potential to cost you a lot more time, money and possibly impact on your team’s or on your mental health.
What Our Clients Say
Discover how organisations have efficiently and effectively resolved workplace issues using Life Mediation’s Workplace Mediation services.