Question

In most organizations, management generally tries to encourage their personnel to bring disputes to the notice of supervisory staff to mediate and resolve. Unfortunately, this usually doesn't happen until the conflict has reached a near critical stage.

The main reason is because most front line workers will not report interpersonal conflicts. They remain silent largely because they believe it would damage their reputations with their fellow co-workers and they would be labeled as squealers.

On the other hand, no one enjoys working in a workplace fraught with friction. The uninvolved personnel would like to see the issues resolved, but often remain silent. The reason is because they aren't trained on how to mediate disputes. If you were to take a poll of your workplace, it is likely you would learn that most employees prefer to resolve such disputes in-house, without management input.

The smartest way to deal with this problem is to be proactive. This means you should act before a problem arises, and not just react after the damage has left its impact. How could this be done?

Answer 1

In my opinion, in order to manage work place disputes, the organization should arrange training programs for the employees to guide them on managing the disputes whenever it arises. The training should be made a part of the induction program given to the new employees for managing the disputes proactively. Hiring an expert in dispute resolution would be more helpful than using in-house talents. The organization also should develop a dispute resolution policy so that the managers and employees can utilize the same for taking fair decisions in the case of workplace disputes. The management should be open to the employee concerns and encourage them to share the issues so that they would inform the managers even in the case of small issues. The managers can take necessary steps to avoid the dispute reaching critical stage. The management can also select a person from each team as mediator and also assign the task to monitor and identify the chances of conflicts among team members and act proactively to solve the conflict or inform management about conflict situations.