Member Article

Office conflict - the cost

When office squabbles step over the line:

Imagine this ….

• You manage a team in a call centre. An employee has stolen a computer game from a colleague’s car and has refused to release it. Other employee’s are changing the language on each other’s computers or disturbing the working time with some commotion. Someone mutilates an ID card with a permanent marker. You could be forgiven in discounting this as just boisterous behaviour or just normal office ‘banter’ But matters soon spin out of control. Someone goes ‘over the edge’ and attacks a co-worker at their desk and kicks them unconcious.

It may sound as if this is in the realms of fantasy but these incidents were all too real. They took place in a call centre in the North East in 2013. The result was that eight employees had their contracts terminated as well as the manager - although later, she was successful with her claim at the employment tribunal for unfair dismissal.

• A businesswoman successfully sued an IT Company for nearly £100,000 after a long running disagreement with her boss who caused her involuntary resignation. The court heard how he was decidedly unhappy as a consequence of the lady being entitled to maternity pay. The aggrieved boss stated “If I were pregnant I would not be entitled to maternity pay because I am a man“.
• An investment consultant sued her former Company for harassment after her association with another director went sour. The director identified her with an African prostitute and advised her that ‘she was in charge of the shopping’. Later defending his behaviour by stating ’I am sorry, I must have mistaken you for my wife’.
• At the head of the catalogue of trivial office acrimony compiled by protecting.co.uk is an organisation where two members of the clerical staff refused to be in the same room together after one drew a moustache on a photograph of Gary Barlow belonging to the other. The defacement was erased but the ensuing row ended in an arbitration procedure and the “aggressor” had to be transferred.

According to a new CIPD report published in March 2015; ’Tracing Workplace Conflict’ one in three UK employees has reported either an isolated incident or conflict in the last year. The most common type of conflict was with line managers, followed by colleagues in a team and then direct reports. The single most prevalant cause was “clashes in personality or, working styles”.

If you push a group of people together in an office, there will be personality conflict and competition. Managers are not normally given the skills to deal with awkward situations, so they’d rather not. This allows the situations as described above to develop and get out of control.

The cost to the enterprise in terms of; loss of productivity, breakdown of team relationships, stress, organisation credibility, reputational damage and financial are immeasurable.

Drawing on my over 35+ years personal experience as a former HR Manager in industries as diverse as: Rubber Manufacturing, Civil Engineering, Food Preparation, Brewing and Retail and for the last 10 years as an independent Employment Law & People Management Specialist, in handling:

• Numerous complaints, grievances, appeals to grievances, disciplinary hearings, appeals to disciplinary sanctions, dealing wth inter-departmental and individual disagreements disputes and conflict. Following both the company internal formal procedures and the Acas Code of Practice for Discipline & Grievances for resolving these issues, which have included alcohol and drug addiction, sexual harassment and discrimination, age, gender, gender reassignment and bullying and harassment complaints. Spending weeks in preparation and representation in response to 60+ employment tribunal claims over the past 35+ years, which may take up to a year or more to be heard and spending up to five days in employment tribunal hearings.

Workplace Mediation is not the panacea for all disputes. Mediation may not be appropriate where for example a decision of right or wrong is needed possibly where there is criminal activity, an individual is experiencing mental health problems, such as severe stress, or has challenging learning difficulties or where managers are avoiding their managerial roles.

However, mediation is notably well suited to situations where there are dysfunctional working relationships, personality clashes, difference in styles of working, when managers are not well placed to deal with the situation or an acceptance that the problem needs to be sorted out.

Mediation in the workplace is a positive advance to the avoidance of legal action and the elevation of a more agreeable working environment. By its very nature mediation can bring about early informal resolutions to conflict or disagreements in the workplace, without the parties raising a formal complaint. If the problem journey’s through the organisations formal grievance, disciplinary and appeals procedures, it’s usually a ‘tick box’ approach prior to the completion of an application to the employment tribunal.

Mediation is a process whereby an independent third party is appointed to help disputants reach a mutually agreed settlement with one or more employees in dispute. Mediation is; voluntary, confidential and the mediator is impartial and neutral. The cost of mediation is minimal compared to disputes that lead to litigation.

For example; Royal Mail and its Trades Union the Communication Workers Union (CWU) and Unite have for the first time signed a contract to employ external mediators to help deal with workplace issues and establish fairness in the workplace at an early stage in a company that employes 150,000.

Topshop the fashion retailer, and part of the Arcadia Group, created a pilot programme to identify how mediation could support its existing conflict resolution solutions. Within 12 months of the programme Topshop experienced a 50% reduction in grievances, while grievances increased by 12% across the rest of the Arcadia Group. It recognised that mediation had a positive impact on the engagement and wellbeing of staff experiencing some form of conflict in the workplace and rolled the programme out across the rest of the Arcadia Group.

Mediation is not generally well accepted by many organisations, because:

• Little awareness or understanding of workplace mediation by companies
• In an adverserial context, mediation is perceived as being a ’feeble or weak’ response to resolving conflict
• Difficulty in accessing independent professional mediation services
• The cost of mediation
• Over-adherence to traditional discipline grievance and appeals procedures
• Reluctance to change and …
• The cost benefits of mediation

It was reported in the July 2015 edition of the CIPD’s PMDaily that Acas dealt with 83,000 Early Conciliation cases between April 2014, when the scheme was launched, and March 2015.

The report claimed that Early Conciliation saves time compared to tribunals, with employers spending an average of five hours on a dispute, compared to five days for employment tribunal cases.

Would not the implementation of mediation being offered as an early intervention and solution to many forms of interpersonal conflict in the workplace be the answer to many of the 83,000 cases ever progressing to Early Conciliation?

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The Business Medic .