While some degree of conflict in the workplace will always be inevitable, the key to maintaining a cohesive and high-performing team is to know how to manage it so that everyone involved can remain focused on their performance despite their differences.

Here are five tips to help you effectively negotiate workplace conflicts to achieve better outcomes for everyone involved.

Tip 1: Define your role?

The first integral element of successful dispute resolution is:

• That you understand what your role is in the dispute.  Are you there to facilitate a negotiated outcome with the parties?  Or, provide guidance around process? Or are you there to make decisions about which version has more weight and determine what further action (if any) is appropriate.  Or are you just ‘get me some popcorn’?  Understanding your role will provide you with guidance about what your responsibilities are, and determine what process is the most suited to manage the conflict.

One of the most common conversations we hear from an employee is, ‘I told them and they didn’t do anything’.  In response, the employer often says ‘they told me, but they said not to do anything’.  If you are in a leadership role, depending on what is disclosed, you may be compelled to act on what an employee says, despite their request not to.  If you don’t you could put them, others, and yourself at risk of further harm and breach your own policies and procedures and even external laws. In addition, you could be contributing to a culture of gossip (which now constitutes bullying) if you entertain conversations that diminish a co-worker.  

If an employee or co-worker complains to you, you should ask yourself three questions.

1. Do you know what their expectations of you are? (ie; what do they want you to do and can you meet those expectations?)
2. What outcome are they seeking?
3. What process is best suited to address the concerns raised?

Once these three things are clarified then you will be able to determine what intervention will be best.  

Tip 2: Define the problem?

Conflict resolution in the workplace starts with understanding exactly what the issue is.  Often we get this wrong and implement the wrong strategy to deal with it. For example; David complains to you that he does not like the way a co-worker speaks to him.  He says to you, Robert is so rude and dismissive. He feels undermined and that nothing ever happens to Robert, and there is no point in complaining. You ask him what he wants, and he says nothing and that he just wants to vent to you.  You ask him if he has spoken to Robert, he says that he has on multiple occasions and he gets better for a short time and then reverts back to his bad habits. David says that he has been having some personal problems at home and that normally he could deal with Robert’s attitude but lately its’ really is getting on his nerves.  

What is the problem?

• Does David need to build his personal resilience?
• Does Robert’s behaviour need to be managed?

You can see that defining the problem results in two potential areas, resulting in two different methodologies to deal with them.  To build David’s personal resilience you might refer him to an Employee Assistance Program, or offer coaching, perhaps some team building, and/or he might need some time off to deal with his personal situation. Maybe you decide to act on both identified problems.  Is Robert’s behaviour serious enough to warrant a formal investigation, or perhaps David and Robert could sort out their issues in an informal workplace mediation? Will someone internally facilitates this, or will you use an external provider (such as us at Evolve Workplaces)?  If you don’t know, look to your policies and procedures, scan the Fair Work Commission and Fair Work Ombudsman’s website,  consult your human resource business partners, or alternatively call us to assist you to work out the benefits and risks of the different interventions.  

Tip 3: Administer the Process

Once you have determined what process is best to use then it is time to advise everyone and let them know what you are going to do about their complaint.  If you are going to do nothing, for example; you might decide, that Robert’s behaviour is within the expectations of your team. That sometimes he can be short with people, he is busy, and that sometimes he can be direct.  However, that none of this is a breach of your expectations or internal policies/procedures. Best practice requires that you communicate this to David. Many times, where you decide not to do anything with regard to Robert (or the complaint about example) managers overlook communicating this to the person who complained to them (David).  Often this leaves the complainant with the view that nothing is being done, when in fact, it’s not being done because, in your view, Robert hasn’t done anything that warrants it. It is important that this is communicated to David and perhaps offer him;

• EAP support
• A workplace mediation
• Coaching
• Training

It is also really important to put in some review points.  That is, schedule some time to check in with David about whether his workplace relationship with Robert has improved.  And, lastly but most importantly, capture your thought processes in writing in case you need to explain why you took the action that you did.  We recommend that it is a good habit to email yourself and then save that email in a folder. Emailing yourself gives you a time-stamped contemporaneous note on what happened, and it holds weight if you have to rely on it in the future.

Tip 4: When to Mediate

Workplace mediation is a good alternative to a formal process.  However, the parties need to embody certain characteristics for it to work. The three main characteristics are;

1. They both love what they do
2. They both want to stay in their jobs
3. They are both committed to working through the problem

Workplace mediation is appropriate where the parties have to work together moving forward, one or both have requested it, and where the complaints are not serious enough to warrant a more formal intervention like; disciplinary action, investigation or performance management.  Often workplace mediations, particularly ones where you have engaged an external mediator, are the last chance for participants to demonstrate that they have the skill to resolve their conflict. If the mediation fails (parties are unable to reach agreement) or the parties are unable to keep their commitments, then you will need to consider more formal interventions in line with your policies and procedures.

Even though workplace mediations are informal, make sure you formalise any commitments reached in writing for clarity.  And, that there is a process post-mediation to keep both parties accountable to their commitments.

Tip 5: Intervene as early as possible

It’s also important you intervene as early as possible. If initial attempts to resolve an issue have been unsuccessful, make sure you don’t let the issue fester.

By choosing to ignore an issue, it’s likely it will continue to escalate to a point where it can be difficult to achieve a positive outcome for all parties involved. If you don’t have the conflict resolution skills required to manage the issue yourself, enlist help from a professional mediation company.

Need to learn more about Workplace Mediation? Get in touch with the experts at Evolve Workplaces. We can assist with your mediation, investigations and training needs. Contact us by email or call us today on 1300 414 179.

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Industry

Law / Health

Issue

The two employees had been working together for around 8 months.  During this period, one of the employees, Jessica, felt that the other employee, Sarah, did not respect her knowledge and skills, spoke to her in a derogatory way and had raised complaints to their manager about her.  Jessica felt like she could not trust Sarah, and felt that Sarah was watching her, monitoring her work and making reports to her manager.

Sarah felt that Jessica was not doing her work properly, was putting clients at risk, and was not following protocol. Sarah had raised this with her manager, but only when Jessica was away on holiday and Sarah needed to take over her work.  That is when she raised it with her manager.  Sarah had issues with Jessica’s work and experienced frustration when she tried to speak to Jessica because she gets confronted and starts crying, or just leaves and they are unable to resolve anything.

Outcome

The parties attended the mediation and were able to see where their communications weren’t working.  As the way that they normally communicate played out in their mediation, the mediator was able to raise their awareness about their communication style with each other and identify why it was failing.  Both had a part to play in this.  Once they were able to see this, and hear each other’s view, they were able to consider exploring ways of working into the future.  They reached agreements, and a structure was put in place to review how their relationship and communication progressed into the future.

Follow-up

Six weeks after the mediation Evolve Workplaces contacted the employer who reported that their relationship has changed for the better. They are working together extremely well, and their communication has improved drastically.   Jessica is now reaching out to Sarah for support with work and personal issues.

Please note that the names of participants have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

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What can you expect from an Evolve Mediator?

All Evolve Mediators use the same model across all Australian States.  We are all accredited, experienced mediators.  All Evolve Workplaces’ practitioners use the same model.

It is designed to give you the best opportunity to demonstrate to your employer that you have the skills to deal with any outstanding issues and make agreements about your future working relationship.

The model that we use is facilitative and restorative in nature.  That is, we work with you to talk about areas that you might have found difficult in the past, and we work with you to come up with your own ideas about how to make it work in the future.

We are not there to judge you or tell you what to do.  We know that you are the experts of your own lives, not us.  We are there to support you to make your own choices about how you want this to turn out.

There is a misconception about mediation that we are there to make you reach an agreement.  We are not.  If you don’t want to participate or the mediation fails, that is you can’t reach agreements, then that is ok.  We just need to look at what happens from here.

Does it work?

Over 80% of people who participate in our workplace mediations resolve their outstanding issues and are able to move forward.  So, yes it does work.  We are experts at getting people to talk about issues and come up with ways to deal with it moving forward.

A lot of people come to mediation sceptical.  They can’t see how it will work.  And, that is fine if you feel that way, but don’t let that thought stop you from taking up this opportunity.  The other common thing people tell us, is that, even if they do agree, that they are sceptical about whether the other person will keep their agreements.  So, yes, it is one thing to keep an agreement and another skill to be able to keep those agreements over time.  So, let me talk you through the process.

Intakes

The model that we use incorporates individual, one on one sessions with each of the participants, including the employer.  This is our opportunity for us to meet you, and get a sense of what has happened.  We also use this opportunity to talk you through the process and help prepare you for your mediation.  We use this time to assess whether or not it is appropriate to proceed to a mediation.  These individual sessions are usually conducted in the morning and then we hold the joint session in the afternoon, often referred to as the mediation.  I will be uploading an introduction to intakes in the next few weeks so keep an eye out for that if you want to learn more about what we talk about in those intakes.

What if I don’t want to participate?

It’s fine if you don’t want to participate.  I would encourage you to at least attend the individual one on one intake session with the mediator and share with the mediator your concerns about participating.  We would never make anyone participate in a mediation.  Mediations are voluntary and at any moment, you, me or the other party can terminate a workplace mediation.  This is a genuine opportunity to look at whether or not you can sort out your differences via this process.  Sometimes this process is not appropriate.

What happens if the mediation fails?

The mediation fails if we decide not to proceed to mediation or despite their best efforts the parties are unable to reach agreements in their mediation or if you are unable to keep your agreements into the future.  If this happens then we will be writing a letter to your employer advising them, why the mediation failed.  Then, it is up to your employer to determine what to do.  When we are asked to conduct a workplace mediation, it is informal.  That is, the employer generally has an expectation that you need to sort it out and are giving you an opportunity to show that you can.  However, if you can’t, employers need to look to their policies and procedures and determine what further action is warranted.  Usually, this is the initiation of a more formal process like performance management, investigations, training, counselling or disciplinary action – depending on the complaints and what happens.

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Hello, my name is Anna Faoagali, I am the Director and Principal of Evolve Workplaces. Today this short video, it will run for about five to seven minutes and I am targeting this video to employers, so managers, HR, who want to or are considering engaging us to conduct a workplace mediation facility staff.

Accredited, Experienced, We All Use The Same Process

So what you need to know about us is that I have been doing this for about 20 years and every Evolve mediator uses exactly the same process.

So it doesn’t matter whether I’m delivering it or another mediator is delivering it, the information that I’m giving to you today is consistent across all of our mediators.

We Service Australia-Wide

The second thing is, is this particular process that Evolve uses is designed for workplaces. So it’s designed to work with employers and also employees to create more harmonious relationships.

The Process Intakes

And what we do is we meet with each party individually, each participant, so just for a two‑person mediation, we’ll meet with them in the morning. So we usually put aside an hour for each of the participants and then we also meet with you, the employer, we put an hour aside for you as well, usually HR attends, the manager and anyone else who has an interest in those parties moving forward. So sometimes we get five people at those. They’re a good opportunity to understand a little bit more about what we do and meet us, and also for us to get an insight into what’s happened.

So we like to know things like what happened that this is now a thing for them, we want to know the background, we want to understand what your expectations are. We want to know what any catalysts were that occurred that makes it relevant now because sometimes they may have had conflicts for about 12 months prior to it, so what’s happened that they think it’s going to be necessary to have this type of intervention now.

We also want to know what your expectations are of the participants. In the mediation we want to also understand how you’re going to support them after the mediation, like what infrastructure are you going to put in place to support them to keep their agreements moving forward. So that’s what we talk about in our intakes with you.

This Helps Us Assess Whether Mediation is Appropriate

Basically we do the intakes and then after the intakes we hold the joint session. Make – pending everything is in order and we then – that it’s appropriate to move forward and that it’s not going to put anyone at further risk, we’ll go to the joint session in the afternoon.

The Process – The Joint Session

And we always put aside three hours for that. Now a lot of time people say to us, oh that’s a lot of time, all right, I don’t know if I need all that time. You might be right, and if they don’t need the time we’re not going to force them to be in the room, but what we do find is most people use that time. If you don’t need it, fine, we will finish the mediation and that’s it. But yeah we do ask that that time is put aside because there’s nothing worse than getting into your mediation and then being constrained by the time.

What Happens Next? Post-Mediation

So what happens after the mediation? So where the parties have had a successful mediation and they’ve come up with some agreements, the mediator will work with them to capture those agreements in writing. Once they are captured and they reflect exactly what the parties intentions are moving forward then the mediator will email the manager or HR or whoever the designated person is and also cc in those parties into that email and you’ll get an email with some basic information capturing the three things that we always recommend which is to meet with the parties post-mediation, get some feedback, determine whether they need anything else to help them keep their agreements and schedule a time to review how their relationship is progressing. You’ll get that email with those recommendations in that email.

And then normally we don’t de-brief. Normally we don’t really hear from you again, right, unless you want another mediation. Normally that’s enough for the parties to move forward and it’s a foundation from which they can build their relationship.

Yeah, so if they don’t reach agreement, if they’re unable to reach agreement despite their best efforts or where we have terminated the mediation, either the mediator has, or one of the parties has, you can expect a phone call from us. We will also follow that up with a letter explaining why in our view the mediation failed. In those circumstances you then need to look to your policies and procedures and determine what further action you need to take, usually after the mediation because the mediation is an informal process. It’s an opportunity for the employees to demonstrate to you that they’re able to navigate through that, but that’s not always possible. And so when it’s not possible the employer needs to go back to the drawing board and work out, well how best are we going to manage this moving forward. Mostly that will involve initiating a more formal process like performance management, disciplinary action depending on what they – the sorts of complaints are, and counter complaints are. It might be training, it might be counselling, it might be a range of interventions that you’ll now need to consider.

I just want to add here too that making agreements and keeping agreements are two different things. So we’re really good at making agreements mostly. However, we are not particularly skilled at keeping those agreements over time. So it’s really important that post-mediation, that if you have the funds to support your staff to develop these skills then it’s recommended that you explore those with those participants.

So, yeah, that’s basically it in a nutshell. That’s what our process is. Please feel free to call us and ask us some more questions if you have any and I look forward to working with you.

Okay, bye for now.

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Some real-life examples of someone describing their manager who they allege was gaslighting her in the workplace, reported by www.news.com.au include:

“It’s not really your fault everything is such a mess. I’m sure you tried your best — you just don’t have it in you to do the job properly — not to the standard that is expected.”

“I’ve spoken to everyone in the team and every last one of them indicated the problem is you.”

“I’m planning a restructure and I’ll be honest, I just can’t see a role for you in the new structure.”

“I was wondering if you were okay!” she exclaimed. “You were supposed to call me at 1.30pm and I’ve been sitting here waiting for 30 minutes!”  However, no meeting had been scheduled.

You can hear that the words that the Manager uses undermine the employee or you could hear another interpretation.  Crucially, gaslighting allows for the person being gaslighted to assume that they are imagining things, and that there is no harmful intent on the part of the gaslighter.  Gaslighting exists in the world of perception so it can be really difficult for people to prove that it is even occurring. When we are conducting workplace investigations we often have to unpack these types of conversations.  For example the Manager would argue, ‘I did say something like that but I was definitely complimentary, I said that she tried her best, and the fact is that her performance is not up to standard, so there is nothing malicious in that’.

Employees refer to having agreements with other team members in nearly every workplace mediation and workplace investigation that we do.  People will say ‘it’s not just me, … agrees with me as well’.  Most people will speak to their co-workers about issues they are having.  And, most employees choose other employees who agree with them to speak to.  I can promise you this though, there are many times that we will conduct a workplace interview with those very people, and they will say words to the effect of ‘I just agree because I don’t want to get involved’ and then give their true opinion.

Because the complaint is based on perception it means that the communication can be interpreted in multiple ways by a third party.  A third party being the person complained to such as Human Resources staff, a Supervisor or Manager.

In addition, as a workplace investigator, this type of behaviour, gaslighting, is commonly described as inextricably linked to ‘personality’.  For example, people use words like ‘that is just what she is like’.  Meaning, there is no awareness or malicious intent, that is just how the person conducts themselves.  That’s how they communicate.  That is, she is not intentionally engaging in a malicious campaign or strategy of gaslighting, that’s just her style.

The definition of bullying as outlined above doesn’t infer any intentions.  So, you might not know that you are bullying or gaslighting.  However, if a reasonable person considers that your behaviour is unreasonable and that it creates a risk to your health and safety, then the behaviour could constitute bullying.

Conversely on the scale of bullying, and there is a scale, is there any responsibility on the person complaining to have some resilience and skills to deal with low-level gaslighting?  We at Evolve Workplaces are seeing more and more complaints where the person complaining has not even brought the behaviour that they are complaining about to the attention of the person to fix it.   When is it appropriate to push back on complainants and to have some skills at dealing with challenging behaviours?  That topic I’ll leave for another blog (watch this space).

What would be the consequences of gaslighting someone in the workplace?  Well, it could constitute bullying, so if it could be proved (using the civil standard of proof being the balance of probabilities),and depending on the seriousness of the behaviour,  it could attract disciplinary action (including termination) as it has the components required by the definition of bullying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

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Can I put a straw through a potato? You may not believe it, but yet it is possible. Always watch your own beliefs, judgments and opinions and how they influence your relationship with others despite not necessarily being true. (p.s I am very excited in the video because my family was heckling me and saying it wasn’t possible; and after a few failed attempts I did it!).  In our workplace mediations we work with people to break down initial perceptions and broaden participants views so that they can move beyond their beliefs to create harmonious workplace relationships.  Anna Faoagali, Principal, Evolve Workplaces

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5 tips to building rapport and reducing conflict. Talk to us about how we can support you to facilitate workplace mediations to create harmonious workplace relationships. Created by Anna Faoagali, Evolve Workplaces

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There is nothing said, the complaints all manifest in the metaphysical.  What does an eye roll mean?  What does a sigh mean?  Can these human interactions constitute bullying?  Can these interactions be re-worked and re-interpreted in the future?  At the time, people laughed about it and weren’t offended, then it was re-worked, and was subsequently interpreted in the future as something contaminated, malicious and worthy of causing harm.

How do we complete our deadlines with quality outcomes using positive overtones despite the work not being completed to the level required and being under pressure?  How do we not express our upset, disappointments, frustrations when we are working within budgetary constraints and experience other pressures at work?

These are some of the challenges that we are dealing with today and the methods to mange those complaints  (such as investigations) tend to pull teams apart, generate further hostilities, suspicion and pressure on relationships causing more potential for harm and disruption.  That is what we see.

Unless the behaviour would attract serious disciplinary action such as termination, always exhaust less formal and more restorative options.  Investigations are necessary and required and we do undertake these interventions where necessary.  But it is also very important to put in place strategies post investigation to pull the team back together.  Our team can give your team over an 80% chance of pulling back together.  Make sure you contact us to find out more about our services here at Evolve Workplaces.  Anna Faoagali, Principal, Evolve Workplaces.

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