Dealing with conflict in the work place

Conflict is always amongst us be it at home with our siblings and our partners, at school with our classmates or at work with a colleague. It’s very disappointing when you don’t agree with someone you have to meet daily. Unresolved conflicts make people unhappy at work and can result to break-down in communications and low productivity.

Some signs of conflict at work can be:

• Lack of motivation at work: happens when there is little employees’ input in meetings or briefings.

• Lack of productivity: When people don’t cooperate with one another, if people don’t work together no work can be completed.

• Increased absence to work: Employee calls in sick often. He/she seems not to be pumped up for work.

• Behavior changes: people start to make demeaning remarks towards one another.

Power struggles, ego, pride, jealousy, incompatibility, opposing positions and competitive tensions are a major cause of conflict in the work place. Conflict is unavoidable. It is a normal part of any social and organizational setting, the challenge of conflict lies in how one chooses to deal with it. But it can be controlled in these different ways:

• Avoiding- The aim of this stance is to delay. An individual does not immediately pursue his or her concerns or those of another.

• Understanding one another- Understanding the other colleague. The way to avoid conflict is to help those around you achieve their objectives.

• Compromise- CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) report analysis in 2011, shows that compromise is the best way to solve conflict. Major reasons for using compromise agreements (other than to settle an existing claim) are to remove an employee on grounds of poor performance or misconduct (38.9%), to avoid legal challenge in relation to redundancy (25.7%) and to make it easier to remove senior staff without embarrassment (24.3%).

When working with a difficult person, begin to locate the problem inside yourself. As an individual learn to listen, forgive, empathize and find a common ground. However, when all else fails and positional gaps cannot be closed, resolve the issue not by playing favorites, but by doing the right thing.

“To understand impact, we need to look at ourselves – not judge others”, Author Dr. Ronald Short.