Today’s workplace realities are more complex than ever before. Five generations in the workforce, mounting pressures to achieve critical business objectives, and the positive movements made in authenticity and “bringing your whole self to work” often create dynamics of stress, burnout, and lack of professional purpose. These factors, combined with externalities businesses face on a daily basis, are prone to create workplace conflicts among teams, stakeholder groups, and even customers.
As a corporate citizen, the paragraph above may have resonated with you. You’re not alone! A study by Myers Briggs uncovered that 85% of employees responded they experience workplace conflict in their professional lives. Despite such a large percentage, employees and leaders are often ill-equipped to manage and resolve conflicts that arise on a regular basis.
Where there are people, there is conflict. In fact, employees spend, on average, 2.1 days per week dealing with a conflict of some kind. While most workplace conflicts are highly unique and situational, there are three common categories according to the Myers Briggs study referenced above.
- Relational - Roughly 49% of workplace conflicts arise from personality clashes and inability to mitigate egos. Organizational cultures are dynamic and continually shifting as are employee perspectives and reactions to their environments. These shifting tides contribute to an environment where tensions rise and differences in perspective are more prone to emerge.
- Stress - Stress has an emotional, physical, and physiological impact on our bodies and minds. Workplace stressors continue to create fatigue, burnout, lack of focus, and even physical illness among workforces as they battle the illusive balance of their professional and personal lives. A staggering 36% of workplace conflicts can be attributed to stress in the workplace.
- Unrealistic Workloads - “Make it happen” and “I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think you could handle it” may sound motivational but these classic slogans are, in fact, often attributed to employees feeling they must take on more work and responsibilities to perform and even remain employed. As a result, 31% of workplace conflicts can be attributed to stress.
While the common causes of workplace conflicts are widely researched, published, and even often discussed among colleagues, conflict resolution is still a complicated and delicate skill to develop. In fact, 43% of employees surveyed believe their managers do not resolve conflicts as well or as swiftly as they should. With this all in mind, why is conflict so difficult to manage when it arises in the workplace?
In a recent study conducted by SHRM about the increased call for civility in the workplace, one-third (⅓) of US based workers believe their workplace will become even more uncivil in the next 12 months. They also uncovered that 29% of conflicts arise due to underprepared leaders to deal with conflicts that may emerge. While the root causes of this challenge for leaders are quite vast in scope and focus, there are three primary reasons conflicts are poorly managed or even not managed at all.
- Lack of Clear Ownership - Leaders commonly hold the understanding that working with and resolving conflict is the responsibility of their Human Resources Department. In fact, according to Myers Briggs, unclear ownership is attributed to 21% or reported conflicts in the workplace, creating tensions with decision making processes and performing daily work. Comprehensive and ongoing development of personnel managers and clear policies with assigned owners in workplace policies are essential to mitigate the risks associated with unclear ownership.
- Lack of Skills - CPP, Inc, in their recent report on conflict, uncovered that 60% of workers never received basic conflict management or conflict resolution training. Of those that did receive training, 95% indicated their training helped them navigate workplace conflict positively and seek mutually positive outcomes. Organizations often prioritize functional and skill based knowledge training as a priority which can create a lack of focus on managing workplace conflict.
- Lack of Time - Workforces are increasingly under time and performance pressures which leaves little time for managing issues that arise, including conflict. Yet, the recent study published by Acas on the costs of workplace conflict found that 485,000 employees per year, on average, leave their workplace due to conflicts, leading to decreased output and declines in productivity for the organization. As a result of these findings, one can conclude Prioritizing conflict resolution as it arises can actually save time for leaders in the end.
Ultimately, placing a priority on training the workforce to contend with and even avoid conflict in the workplace can save time, money, and even attrition rates. With the race for top talent still heating up, it is imperative to ensure workers have a safe, productive, and positive work environment. Investing in skill training and capability development at all levels of the organization and on a continual basis can be simplified with the right partner.
At Fluence, we provide customized and agile training for organizations and their workforces for the skills needed to better perform their jobs. We also offer capability development via individual, group, and team coaching workforces need for sustained success and professional growth. Below, we’ll explore how Fluence custom leadership development solutions can help organizations prepare for themselves and their workforces to resolve conflicts that may arise.
- Custom Corporate Training - Conflict arises in a myriad of forms, settings, and workplace scenarios. While there are fundamental conflict resolution skills that can be learned, each organization and employee is unique. These factors necessitate customized approaches to corporate training.
Fluence’s custom training approach begins with deeply understanding the goals of the organization, the needs of the workforce, and the unique context surrounding conflicts that arise. Then, we activate our proprietary four-phase design approach to create a personalized training that offers the skills employees need to identify, resolve, and mitigate conflict in the workplace.
- Group and Team Coaching - As we have explored throughout this blog post, conflict impacts the entire workforce. That said, conflict has a particularly poignant impact on groups and teams directly involved in the conflict. Working through conflict dynamics as a group or team can prove difficult without guided discussion and outside perspective.
Fluence Group and Team Coaching offers an opportunity for groups and/or teams to come together and explore conflict at a deeper level, uncover new perspectives on the situation, and collaborate on an approach to push past conflict and form a more cooperative way of working. At Fluence, we partner with a global community of highly trained, credentialed, and experienced leadership coaches who have context of group and team dynamics from their leadership experience and the unique skills needed to facilitate new perspectives and collaborative learning among groups and teams.
- Individual Coaching - Interpersonal and workplace conflict dynamics are deeply personal and can skew how we view our colleagues, work, and even sense of professional self worth. Intrinsic conflicts can quickly arise if not explored in a safe and supportive environment that combines exploration and action. Through the coaching process, strategies can be formed that allow the leader to contend with their current realities with conflicts and navigate through them successfully should they arise in the future.
Supporting leaders through conflict resolution via individual leadership coaching is action-focused, neuroscientific, and rooted in DEIB principles. A highly skilled Fluence leadership coach can work with individuals on perspective-taking, elevated levels of self awareness, problem solving techniques, and even form new behaviors and neural pathways surrounding conflict in the workplace. When combined with custom corporate training and/or group or team coaching, Fluence coaches can also help leaders bring their learning to life in a highly personalized and applicable manner to their unique context.
Workplace conflict costs an estimated $359 billion annually (NLM, 2023). As performance pressures and interpersonal dynamics grow even more strained with hybrid working environments, multi-generational perspectives, and increased customer demands, the need for agile, accessible, and customized training and coaching is at a critical mass. Enterprise leaders benefit greatly by working with a provider that partners with them closely to understand their needs and design a solution that perfectly molds the context of their workforce.
Going beyond the theoretical, Fluence custom corporate training and coaching incorporates applied learning for skill improvement, measurable impact to business priorities, and a focus on organizational cultural perspectives. As the need for conflict resolution increases over time, relying on self-guided learning libraries and out of the box programming can certainly move the needle for those that engage in the content. Yet, custom skill training targets the specific challenges faced by your workforce and offers actionable solutions to overcome them.
We invite you to partner with us and join our mission to change the landscape of how organizations train, enable, and upskill their workforces!
