In an Accountemps survey, CFOs said they spend six hours a week, on average, managing conflicting parties on their staff. Some of the executives (17 percent) say they spend a quarter to more than half of their precious time dealing with conflict in the workplace.
Sound familiar? Just think what you could do with that six hours a week if you didn’t have to manage all those disagreements that erode into discord. Follow these five ways to encourage your workers to get along with others in the office:
1. Promote the flow of communication
Putting your head in the sand really doesn’t help when there’s conflict in the workplace. Problems rarely resolve themselves on their own and can even become worse if they’re not addressed. So be proactive.
Encourage those on your team who are having difficulty with a coworker to get their disagreements out in the open while they’re still small. Here are some hints you can offer them:
2. Practice what you preach
Managers, of course, need to lead the way with communication on the job. Here are some suggestions executives share to help you prevent conflicts while building rapport with your teams and colleagues:
3. Let your team know you can help
A critical component of leadership is developing a sense of what’s important for you to do in times of stress.
First of all, tell your employees that if they find themselves in over their head, or if they’ve tried to resolve a conflict and the negative behavior continues to impede their work, they can use you as a resource. As a higher-up in your organization, you can provide recommendations and bring in another manager or someone from human resources for mediation.
Some suggestions for helping people work together:
When people believe their voices will be heard, they are more likely to perform at their best. Communication goes both ways, so inspire a relationship where they give you timely status reports and feedback about difficulties or challenges.
4. View everything as a learning opportunity
Perhaps, conflict in the workplace could be seen in a positive light. For all the grief disagreements can cause, there’s an upside when your workers can learn from them. Differing opinions can stimulate innovation and give added impetus for team building.
Helping to resolve disputes can put those you manage in a better position to assume leadership roles in your company. You can tell a temporary worker who wants to move into a full-time role that tact and diplomacy in dealing with conflict in the workplace can make a good impression on management. Or let an employee know that effectively working well with others can help with career advancement.
5. Criticize gently and praise achievement
In a perfect world, everyone on your staff would be flawless at their jobs. But the reality is that they will make mistakes, get into arguments, experience personnel problems, miss deadlines. When you need to call attention to shortcomings, make it your goal to preserve each individual’s dignity. Meet in private and allow them to explain the problem and what might have led to it. Rather than assigning blame, reframe a mistake or failure as a lesson, and focus on what might be done differently in the future.
All professionals appreciate recognition, particularly when they’ve put in extra time or effort. So make a goal to celebrate resolution when your team achieves it. Even if they’ve made just small steps, congratulate them on the progress. They’re not robots, after all!
Excerpt extracted from ILSTV
