Conflict is an unavoidable part of life, whether at home or in the workplace. In fact, according to the CIPD, a quarter of UK employees have experienced workplace conflict in the past year. These disputes range from feeling undermined or humiliated to facing verbal abuse or even discrimination. Left unchecked, workplace conflict can erode morale, lower productivity, and damage job satisfaction, creating a toxic work environment.
Yet despite how common it is, many managers struggle to handle conflict effectively. As an HR professional or leader, it’s crucial to understand your role in resolving disputes and maintaining a positive workplace culture. In this article, we’ll explore practical conflict resolution strategies that will help you de-escalate tensions, improve team dynamics, and foster better communication across your organisation.
What is conflict resolution, and why is it crucial in the workplace?
Workplace conflict resolution does what it says on the tin: it’s about finding mutually agreeable solutions to disputes between team members or groups.
Left unresolved, conflict can fester, creating a toxic workplace beset with problems such as disengaged employees and lower productivity. We’ve all experienced the way resentments and frustrations can simmer away when they’re not properly dealt with, and the way these negative emotions can escalate and spread to those around the affected person. The consequences of this in a professional environment can be severe. No team needs members who’ve checked out emotionally, who don’t want to come into work, or who are pouring their energy not into performing well, but into dealing with negative feelings towards co-workers.
As a leader, it’s up to you to model conflict resolution in a positive way, setting a good example and guiding your teams through difficult interpersonal situations in a healthy, professional manner. When you manage conflict effectively, you restore focus and efficiency. You improve communication, collaboration and trust, helping the people involved to understand one another’s perspectives. This results in a healthier working environment with happier, more productive employees, and it also has a knock-on effect on retention rates, collaboration and just about everything else.
The 5 conflict styles and their impact on resolution
Everyone has their own way of responding to conflict, shaped by their own experiences of disagreements, both personal and professional. These can be summarised into five different ‘conflict styles’ that dictate how someone typically reacts when conflict arises. These are:
- Avoiding: someone with this conflict style instinctively withdraws from conflict. While this can be a useful strategy in low-stakes situations, reducing the risk of conflicts escalating, it can also result in unresolved issues and simmering resentments.
- Competing: when an employee has this conflict style, their response to conflict is to ‘look out for number one’. This can prove effective in urgent situations, but again can breed resentment.
- Accommodating: the accommodating conflict style sees someone putting others’ needs first. This can be helpful in preserving relationships, but it can cause personal frustration when someone privately feels their own needs or concerns aren’t being addressed.
- Compromising: the ‘finding the middle ground’ option. This is what many people take to be the essence of conflict management, and indeed it’s effective when you need a quick resolution, but there’s always a danger that both sides end up feeling dissatisfied with the outcome.
- Collaborating: this is the ideal way of dealing with conflict, requiring the two parties to work together to arrive at a solution both can agree on. It’s the best way of achieving a resolution that works long term, but it usually won’t happen overnight.
Remembering that everyone’s different, and considering the experiences that will have led someone to react the way they do, is the first step towards empathic workplace conflict resolution. So where do you go from there?
Strategies for conflict resolution in the workplace
With these conflict styles in mind, let’s look at some of the most effective conflict resolution strategies you can use next time there’s a disagreement among your team.
Identify the root cause
Conflict doesn’t arise out of nowhere, so the first step towards effective conflict resolution is to get to the bottom of the root cause. Arguments that can seem petty often have a much deeper issue at their heart, or may be a symptom of an accumulation of resentments that have built up over a long time.
Active listening techniques, such as asking open-ended questions, listening attentively and repeating back key points, are important here, and will help you to understand the differing points of view of those involved. This should help you come up with a resolution that addresses these deeper issues, not just what’s visible on the surface.
Encourage open communication
Open communication goes hand in hand with active listening in conflict resolution. To help team members through challenging situations, you’ll need to create a safe environment in which everyone feels they can voice their concerns.
Each party should be able to explain their frustrations without the fear they’ll be judged or face retaliation, and as a leader, it’s important to treat both sides with empathy. Simply feeling heard can make employees more likely to work with you to find a solution, so use group or one-to-one meetings to encourage them to give both good and bad feedback and get everything out in the open.
Focus on collaboration
The fifth of the conflict styles we saw earlier is the most effective, so this is the one to focus on in your workplace conflict resolution strategy. Collaboratively working through problems gets both sides together to hash out the issues and arrive at an outcome both are happy with rather than seeing the situation as one side ‘winning’ and the other ‘losing’.
There’s likely to be a bit of brainstorming and ‘middle ground finding’ involved here, but the hope is that by problem-solving together, the employees involved are more likely to feel they’ve had an active role in finding a sustainable solution to the issue.
Mediate effectively
While collaboration between both sides in the argument is key to finding a workable solution, as a leader it’s your role to act as a mediator. You’re there to guide discussions and keep them on track, ensuring a resolution that’s fair to both parties.
This isn’t always easy. If the relationship between the two employees has broken down to the point where communication isn’t working, you’ll need to act as an impartial, non-judgmental third party to diffuse the situation and help one side understand the other’s point of view. To help facilitate discussion, begin by setting out a few ground rules, such as not talking over each other, and then watch for any changes in body language and tone of voice that might suggest the discussion is becoming heated again.
Your role as mediator continues after the immediate dialogue, ensuring that the proposed resolution is stuck to and that it’s having the desired effect.
Consider your responsibilities as a leader
Stepping in to act as a mediator isn’t the only role you have as a leader when it comes to workplace conflict resolution. At times like these, it’s more important than ever to lead by example, adopting a calm, respectful tone that encourages the two parties involved to remain professional. You’ll also need to be proactive, looking out for signs of conflict before it escalates, taking an empathic approach to nipping it in the bud and being transparent in finding a fair solution.
Key conflict management skills every leader needs
With all that in mind, let’s now turn to the skills you need as a leader to manage conflict in the workplace.
- Reflective listening – we’ve already spoken about active listening, but reflective listening is just as important. This involves listening closely to each employee’s concerns and repeating them back, demonstrating that you’ve understood what they’re saying and minimising tension.
- Managing emotions – this is an important part of emotional intelligence, and to responding effectively and empathically to people’s concerns. Even though you might find yourself sympathising more with one side than the other, keeping your own emotions in check is vital to maintaining impartiality, staying calm and refraining from judgement.
- Problem solving – this is a key skill for any leader across the whole gamut of workplace situations, but it’s particularly relevant to resolving conflict. You’ll need to be able to break down the problems and work together with each party to figure out a solution that works for both.
- Understanding – making sure people feel understood is vital to diffusing conflict, and this takes time. Patiently working through the issues at a manageable pace, and not expecting too much too soon, will help you build the trust of both parties and ensure everyone’s views are heard.
Tools to support conflict resolution
Alongside these key skills, there are tools available to help. Workplace assessments can help you quickly identify potential conflicts and address them early. Our psychometric testing and connection platform are great for managing conflict, because they provide objective insights that mean you can look fairly at the issues and the personalities and behavior involved.
With the help of our AI Coach, Thom, this connection platform gives everyone on your team insights into their own working style. This gives you all the tools you need to understand each other properly, enhancing collaboration and making it a key aid in conflict resolution.
Preventing workplace conflict
Whatever the context, prevention is always better than cure. With the right tools and understanding, it’s possible to avoid conflict from arising in the first place, which is a much better scenario than having to work through conflict resolution strategies after it has occurred.
Clear communication is the bedrock of conflict prevention, and you can take proactive steps to ensure it happens. For example, using regular one-to-one check-ins to set clear expectations and discuss issues makes sure everyone understands that the communication channels are open. This should mean that employees have an outlet to air their concerns before they escalate into actual conflict, keeping tension and misunderstandings to a minimum.
Of course, confusion over job roles and expected behavior is itself a common cause of workplace conflict, so setting clear expectations should also indirectly work towards reducing misunderstanding and resentment.
Another important goal in reducing the likelihood of conflict is fostering strong teamwork. Clear communication plays a key role in helping people work together effectively, but it is also essential for ensuring employees feel a sense of belonging, understanding, and respect.
Team-building activities will help employees bond in a less formal environment, at the same time as building trust and enabling people to understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses and ways of doing things. This makes them more likely to be forgiving of each other, and less likely to fall out in the first place.
Mastering conflict resolution
There’s no getting away from the fact that conflict resolution is one of the more challenging aspects of office life, in particular for leaders. But it’s well worth having some of the conflict resolution strategies we’ve discussed here up your sleeve to manage disputes effectively.
Making sure you’re clear on what you need to do if conflict arises will help you minimise its impact on your team and the wider business, while also giving you the confidence to step in and mediate empathetically. The results, including more cohesive teams, higher employee job satisfaction, and better performance, are well worth the effort.
If you’d like the support of a cutting-edge connection platform powered by proven people science to help you manage and prevent conflict in your workplace, get in touch with our experts today.
