In a previous blog, we focused on the benefits of creating a workplace culture that deals with conflict in a healthy way. Culture is not a destination. It’s not like you arrive there, then don’t have to do anything. An organization’s workplace culture is something we constantly nurture.
Building Team Culture Throughout the Year
One of my corporate clients has a “culture team”, and their culture team’s prime function is to look at culture-building activities throughout the year. Sometimes it’s training, sometimes it’s all-employee group town hall meetings, and sometimes it is interactive exercises or field trips.
Tackling Conflict Sooner Than Later
They offer incredible opportunities and activities to build culture throughout the year, which then builds trust and builds relationships. In such workplace cultures that have been consciously built up, when conflict does arise (because we know conflict will happen in a workplace), the team is more comfortable addressing situations sooner because the culture supports the healthy resolution of conflict (instead of brushing issues under the rug). Workplace cultures that are conflict-avoidant tend to let issues linger and go unresolved, which damages relationships and the team culture/environment.
The longer we leave conflict to fester, the more convoluted, complicated, and challenging it becomes… (Yes, the challenges start with Cs). The disagreements pull in more uninvolved people. The issues get messier. The emotional impacts make it harder to talk about. Dealing with conflict sooner rather than later is best.
Creating Psychologically Safe and Healthy Workplaces
Another strategy to circumvent some of the challenges and costs of conflict is to build culture from psychologically safe and healthy workplaces.
We do a lot of work in my company around the The Mental Health Commission of Canada’s 13 Factors of Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, and they are woven throughout our training programs. A lot of companies now are really paying attention to the 13 factors.
Policy Development for Conflict
It’s important to ensure you have well written and useful policies and procedures around conflict that support psychologically safe and healthy workplaces. Many of the policies that I’ve reviewed over the last 25 years are not strong policies, to be honest.
A typical policy might say something like:
“If in conflict, go first to the person that you have the conflict with and talk about it. If you can’t resolve it, then come and engage the supervisor.”
That may sound great at first glance, but a policy like that is riddled with problems and here’s why.
Many people don’t know how to start the conversation. So, when our policy says, “Go first and talk to the person that you have the problem/conflict with,” we need to consider things like safety.
Is that a conflict that could be safely managed between those two people? Do they have the skills to do this? And the answer is often no. A lot of times, policies that are very high-level like the one above don’t provide guidance or procedures to follow.
What I’ve Seen in Workplaces
When I used to mediate conflicts, I would ask people, “How did you get here? What happened to result in you coming to mediation?”
A lot of people, quite frankly, told me, “Charmaine, I didn’t know how to start the conversation.” Or they’d say something like, “Charmaine, I had no idea what to say. I knew I needed to deal with it. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to start the conversation. I was afraid of making it worse. I didn’t want to get in trouble.”
These are a lot of the fears that people have and therefore don’t go and have those courageous dialogues, the conversations that matter most and are mostly avoided.
So, a policy needs to be a lot deeper than the overarching one I used as an example above, and it must be supported by a well-thought-out procedure that guides people, that helps them have these conversations, and it must be supported by training. It doesn’t help you as an employee to have a great policy and great procedure if people don’t have the skills and the confidence to put that policy and procedure into action.
Support for Leaders & Employees Around Conflict Resolution Skills
The very large majority of leaders that I have interviewed over the past 25 years spend more than 40% of their time dealing with people issues, conflict, or those “tough” conversations. Despite this, they often have less than three hours of training related to conflict resolution. Many of them have zero training. I’m not talking leadership, DEI, or culture building training. Those are incredibly important leadership skills, but they are not conflict resolution training.
I see similar stats for employees when I train, when I speak, and when I consult. When I was a mediator, I would look at how much training people had and very few employees had more than three hours of training. So, again, we’re asking people to have these conversations, but they may lack confidence and skills. The right training can support your policy and your procedure. It also supports the team, the leaders, and the HR team. There needs to be a process so that people learn the optimal structure or approach to conflict resolution.
For example, people will often say things like, “We’ve had the conversation and we came up with an agreement. Now what?” One of the things I loved about mediation is that it provided the structure needed around conflict resolution processes. At the end of mediation (or close to the end of mediation), we would talk about what happens next, what’s the go-forward plan, or what’s the follow-up plan. There was a structure in place for those parties that resolved their conflict together to be able to check in with each other, to have a follow-up, and to rebuild the trust and relationship.
But when we’re not in a process (for example, two employees having a conversation about a conflict together), there isn’t that external and objective facilitator leading that conversation. So how do we help our employees and our teams remember that there needs to be follow-up and check-in? What does that process look like? How can we build this awareness and skill set into the workplace culture?
Take a few minutes to think about the benefits of well-managed conflict and how it contributes to workplace culture. In our upcoming blogs, we will continue diving into this topic.