It’s no secret that managing conflict takes a large toll on an organisation’s finances and time. To quickly estimate the costs to your organisation, calculate how much work time you or your staff spend managing conflict (for example, 15% per person) then add any absenteeism rates to that. Calculate the cost of training new staff if you have high turnover rates, then add it to the overall amount. Finally, try to estimate the overall impact on your staff’s output and add that to the total. How does this look to you? If you’re like most organisations, managing conflict has quite a substantial impact that can clearly be seen when calculated. If there was another type of issue that was draining so much of your money and time, would you address it? Of course you would!

To make matters worse, if you allow conflicts to escalate without addressing them, you will likely incur leave costs, legal fees and settlement payouts. On top of that, you’ll be staking your reputation with customers/clients and new employees, tarnishing your brand name or culture and putting the health and safety of your current staff at risk.

An organisation who doesn’t manage conflict or only manages it when it comes to breaking point will end up literally paying for it. If you have processes in place to manage conflict via mediation or conflict training, or if you employ us to complete your workplace investigations, you’ll prevent those big costs long before they occur.