Employee Relations
Internal Conflict – Employee Squabbles
As a small business owner, how much of your time is eaten up refereeing petty squabbles between your staff or settling turf wars between your supervisors? How often to you walk back into your office shaking your head and asking yourself, “Am I a boss or a babysitter?”
Any HR manager will tell you that the moment your busines took on its first employee, it also took on the responsibility of resolving internal conflicts. And instead of just ignoring problems or wishing them away, smart small business owners realize the importance of confronting personnel conflicts early. “Unmanaged employee conflict is perhaps the largest reducible cost in organizations today – and probably the least recognized,” says Daniel Dana, author of Conflict Resolutions: Mediation Tools for Everyday Worklife. In this book, Dana estimates that more than 65% of workplace performance problems are the result of strained relationships between co-workers rather than individual lack of skill or motivation.