Despite making careful efforts of hiring employees based on their skills, experiences, and cultural fit, workplace conflict can still happen between coworkers. After all, it’s hard to predict how your employees would get along once they’re placed in one working environment. Workplace conflicts are inevitable, and they can happen due to various reasons. Generally, they start from minor disputes or feelings of indifference until they blow up into intense conflicts that could adversely affect the entire department or even the whole company. 

Sometimes, employees would take the initiative to sort things out on their own. Other times, feelings of resentment could develop, especially when other employees start taking sides. What’s worst, they may begin sending each other passive-aggressive emails, disrupting the whole business operations. So whether it’s a minor or major dispute, it’s important to intervene in any misunderstanding within the company before things get worse. And one way to resolve workplace conflict is through mediation.  

Mediation is a way to make each side reach a mutual agreement without saying who’s right or wrong and commanding them what to do. If you’re unsure where and how to start, here are eight tips for mediating conflicts in the workplace.  

1 Get In There Early

The moment you see things heating up in the office, you need to jump in as early as you can. Whether it’s a minor conflict or a simple work-related misunderstanding, having a mediator is a great way to stop these conflicts from getting worse and causing permanent damage to your workforce. Generally, the human resource manager or the operations manager can step up as a mediator whenever conflicts arise. If you’re the mediator, make it clear to everyone involved you’re not taking any sides and you’re there to help resolve the conflict.  

2 Collect As Much Information About The Conflict

As a mediator, you need to first understand when, why, and how the conflict started. You can call everyone concerned for a group discussion and ask each one about their point of view. Make sure when one person talks, the rest stays silent. If anyone intervenes with a comment, reaction, agreement, or rejection, you can call them out and tell them to wait for their turn to talk. You should also intervene in case one or more persons would attack another. 

The primary purpose of this discussion is to make the disagreement clear for everyone and know how each of them views the conflict. Once everyone has spoken out their point of view, you may start asking questions and pay attention to the inconsistencies and common ground in their stories. In terms of conflicts, there are three versions of the story: side 1, side 2, and, most importantly, the truth. Hearing everyone’s sides and views would give you a full 360-degree context of the real story.  

If the conflict needs a witness, you can call on the attention of the employees who were there during the disagreement. They can also give their point of view on how they perceive the conflict. If you’re having difficulty fleshing out the side of one or both conflicting parties, it may be best to call on professional employment lawyers. You can look for one from sites like www.chwilliamslaw.com and similar firms to help you resolve the issue.  

3 Watch Out For Any Friendly Fire

During workplace conflicts, some employees may start casually attacking each other by saying personal things to offend or verbally assault each other. The thing about this friendly fire is it often happens modestly and discreetly, making it easier to go unnoticed. If they’re left unaddressed much longer, it would only fuel the conflict, making it more of a personal misunderstanding rather than a work-related matter.

So whether there’s an existing conflict in your workplace or not, be watchful of how your employees interact with each other. It may be best if you set up some ground rules, such as no finger-pointing, name-calling, swearing, and similar offensive and provoking acts.   

4 Keep Everything Offline

With the modern world surrounded by technology, it’s easy for some people to take out their rage and rants by posting on social media platforms. Unfortunately, bringing conflicts online would only expose the issue more, leading to more chaos. 

As a mediator, don’t forget to include in your ground rules that posting conflicts, work-related issues, and other company problems are prohibited. Otherwise, sanctions shall be implemented. If workplace conflict arises, assemble the parties involved and discuss it in a closed office or conference room. This way, the rest of the employees who are not involved wouldn’t be able to listen to, watch, or overhear the discussion.  

5 Encourage Both Sides To Understand

The point of mediating in case of a conflict is to allow both parties to reach an agreement, no matter how impossible it may sometimes seem. Once both sides were able to speak out their point of view, arguments, and reasons, encourage them to listen and understand what each one has to say. Even if it sounds contradicting to their own arguments, choosing to listen can help open their minds and hopefully understand the ideas of others. 

This strategy may not always end with a mutual agreement on all issues. But it can still teach your employees to be more understanding with the perspective of others without arguing against them.  

6 Prohibit Any Type Of Criticism During Mediation

One habit people have in common and that’s tough to break is being critical to those they work with. Whether it’s against colleagues, bosses, or clients, it’s perhaps inevitable to criticize someone. But if you look at it closely, it’s not being critical of other people’s attitudes or personalities that leads to conflict. It’s how you react to a situation.  

A good example is when you’re annoyed with a colleague after they’ve increased your workload. Generally, your first response would be irritation and resentment toward them. However, the best way to respond to situations like this is to focus on the issue itself and not on the person. So you can ask yourself, ‘How am I going to deal with more workloads?’ or ‘How will I manage my time?’ If it’s impossible to handle everything at once, you can approach your colleague peacefully and raise your concern about reducing your workload.  

7 Settle On An Agreement

Now that everyone in the room knows and understands each other’s piece, you can ask them what they’d like to happen after that. You may ask facilitating questions such as these: 

• What will you both do to move past this conflict? 
• What’s your proposed solution? 
• How can we resolve this issue with both of your needs considered? 

You can ask other similar questions. Just put in mind the goal: make both employees feel heard, understood, and pleased with the outcome and be willing to move forward. 

8 Make Plans To Prevent Future Conflicts

Just because your employees have made up doesn’t mean you should stop there. Reconciliation is only an immediate outcome. So you must also think of ways to prevent any similar workplace conflicts in the future. Some long-term plans you can do may include doing an honest staff forum every month or a one-on-one session with your employees quarterly. 

Conclusion

Mediating a workplace conflict is often challenging as you’d want to settle everything through an agreement without hurting or compromising any of your employees. Hopefully, these tips would guide you in successfully intervening in your employees’ conflicts and maintaining peace in your working environment.  

Carrie Waits is an employee engagement specialist from New Jersey, USA, who has been in the industry for more than 15 years.