Conflict in the Workplace

Thanks for putting up with me as I took the month of March off. Now back to the business of thinking out loud on workplace and employee performance. How many of you have experienced conflict with an employee or conflict between employees in your workplace? Unless you work alone, I am going to assume that you have. Workplace conflicts have always been a part of working and have long been a source of pain for managers and business owners the world over. Even removing generational differences (a common source of conflict today as more generations work together than ever before) conflict has eaten up more productive time for managers than most other issues. If we could even cut our time spent managing conflict in half think of how much better use we could make of our time as business owners and managers? Time that could be spent working on our business instead of just in it. Time we could use to improve ourselves and the employees that work for us. No matter how much or how little conflict we experience in our workplace, reducing it will have tremendous positive impact on our lives. From improved productivity to improved morale and the reduction of stress on all workers (including managers), to quote Martha Stewart, reducing conflict is "a good thing."

So how do we go about reducing conflict in our workplace? It is one thing to go on and on about the benefits of the cure, but what exactly will cure the disease in the first place? First and foremost you must determine what is causing conflict between managers and employees, and between individual employees. I am going to propose one single strategy at this time that 99% of organizations fail to address. Information. Do you have enough information about your employees? Do your employees have enough information about themselves, about their fellow employees, or about their managers? Do they understand the different behaviors and motivations that cause people to act the way that they do? Do you? Behavioral Science and business have combined today in ways that make it relatively fast and cheap for managers to administer multiple assessments on themselves and their employees that will provide all the information needed. Are you investing in your people, in yourself and your organization to ensure that your future is brighter. You can also gain a lot of this information by spending more time with each employee outside of work and at work but this process of observation will take a long time and be very costly. The properly applied assessment tool can deliver much of the information needed quickly and economically, and as an added bonus will allow you to draft the proper strategy to build a better long term relationship with each employee. This is important! People leave people not companies, and you will only be as successful as the team you are able to develop and retain. Well that's all for me today, for any other questions about the use of assessments in the workplace, why not check out one of our informative webinars at www.workforcesurvival.com.