HOW TO RESOLVE WORKPLACE CONFLICTS 101

The workplace already offers most of you with enough stress and workload, to begin with. If you add conflict with one of your colleagues to those burdens, it just builds on your, already heightened, stress level. Now, can you imagine going to your office every day, and facing a colleague who neither respects you nor any of your decisions you tend to take? Of course, all these factors would make you feel less motivated to get up in the morning and get ready to go for work. The worst-case scenario could be, you taking more sick leaves than usual, or even entirely giving up your job.

Conflict with colleagues, mostly with superior ones, is not unheard of; in fact, it is an everyday reality for the majority of workers. This problem is made worse than it should be by senior managers who don’t have any idea about how to resolve any workplace conflict or who just let it slide under the carpet, hoping others don’t notice it much.

The significance of conflict resolution in the workplace is highly underestimated. Being able to get the conflict handled and managed well can help improve the situation when it comes to internal relationship problems. Business conflict resolution also leads to the prevention of an environment that breeds any kind of negativity, demotivation, stress, and general unrest amongst the employees. It is known that such hostile work environments have negative consequences to the growth of the company such as, more absentees, frequent staff turnover, feuds within one department, and unhappy staff who would be looking for new and better jobs, offering healthier work environment.

There are certain ways in which you can resolve a conflict at work, let’s talk about a few of them below.

• Don’t slide it under the rug:
  As the leader of your office, ignoring workplace conflicts and keep procrastinating on resolving them are the worst things you can do. It is only natural that conflicts would take place, more so in an office space due to the tension and stress of the mountain of workload. By choosing to ignore the issue and indulging in business conflict resolution, a weak leader would self-destruct and watch the drama as his/her employees go against one another day after day. However, if you’re a strong leader, you would step and put an end to the conflict personally and amicably.
• Conflict resolution service:
  At times, the conflicts at work get way too intense and it becomes almost impossible to handle them. That is when you should invest in a third-party mediation or conflict resolution company so that you have the support of the professionals to eradicate the conflict once and for all. The workplace mediator, who is a trained and experienced professional, evaluates the risk to your business and appropriately assists you in putting out the fire that can cause heavy damage to the profits of your firm.

Of course, you’ve heard of the famous saying “Ignorance is bliss” and that is true but not when it comes to cases like this. A conflict is a fire that needs to be put out as soon as possible because if not then it has the tendency to get more intensified and can turn into a wildfire.

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Rogerlevittmediation Joined: April 27th, 2020