How to Resolve Workplace Conflict With These 9 Mediation Tips

All businesses depend on people to succeed, so when there’s friction and conflict in the workplace, it can lead to significant problems like diminished productivity and dissatisfaction in the workforce.

Most employers will come across this challenge at some point. Those that deal with it in a professional and effective manner can take valuable lessons from the experience and move on. However, those that either ignore or mismanage it are likely to see the consequences further down the line.

So what mediation strategies can you use to make sure you're in the former camp?

1.    Find a safe and neutral place to talk

Having frank and honest conversations is a crucial part of managing conflict and ensuring that everyone involved in the situation feels like they're being heard. For people to open up and share what's really bothering them, they need to be in an environment that feels safe and neutral. The conversation certainly shouldn't occur in either party's office or an area that feels familiar to one person and alien to the other.

2.    Set ground rules

Establishing some ground rules for how the conversation should go and how the employees involved are expected to behave is key to ensuring that it's a worthwhile and productive exercise. These might include:

• No raised voices or aggressive attitudes
• Participants need to give each other time to speak
• Stick to facts and avoid gossip, rumor and speculation

3.    Encourage 'I' statements

Asking people to use 'I' statements - which focus on the speaker’s thoughts or feelings, as opposed to opinions or characteristics the speaker attributes to the listener - can be a particularly effective way of encouraging productive discussions.

An example of this could be one team member saying to another: "I found last week's meeting difficult because I felt I didn't have the time to get my points across", rather than: "You took over the whole meeting and didn't let me speak."

4.    Make sure everyone is heard

To be an effective and truly impartial mediator, you need to ensure everyone gets a fair chance to express their views and tell their side of the story. This becomes particularly important when there’s conflict between someone who’s naturally outspoken and another person who’s more reserved. Introverts should have just as much opportunity to speak as extroverts.

5.    Ask participants to reiterate statements made by others

This tactic can come in useful if you want to find out if the participants in the discussion have been listening to each other and taking the other person's opinions on board. Asking someone to repeat another person's thoughts or feelings in their own words also encourages empathy and compassion.

6.    Focus on needs, not positions

Workplace conflict can be particularly difficult to manage when the people involved become entrenched in a fixed position or point of view. When this happens, it can prove useful to concentrate on the respective individuals' underlying needs and concerns, rather than getting caught up in opinions and accusations.

For example, a conflict that arises over one team member feeling that another isn’t pulling their weight could reflect underlying problems such as unsustainable workloads or unclear distribution of responsibilities.

7.    Brainstorm and discuss solutions

When you start to think about solutions to the issues that led to the conflict, there could be opportunities to encourage the people involved to work together in a brainstorming session, if they're ready and willing to do so.

Introducing an element of collaboration into the mediation process will help the participants to take each other's views into account. It’ll also increase the likelihood that you'll come up with fair and equally beneficial solutions.

8.    Determine how each party can help move things forward

Finding and implementing resolutions to workplace conflict becomes easier when the people involved have an active role to play in leading the process and achieving positive outcomes. It's important to be clear about the responsibilities each party has in working through the problem and preventing clashes happening again in the future.

For managers, a key part of moving on from these situations is monitoring relationships and evaluating the effectiveness of any solutions that have been put in place.

9.    Design strategies for the future

As well as managing conflicts when they occur, you should be looking to the future and taking proactive steps to reduce the risk of the same problems surfacing again. This might involve making structural or operational changes within the business to address the underlying causes of past conflict.

Think about the lessons you can learn from times when co-workers have fallen out and how this was managed. The most useful conclusions could be incorporated into your workplace policies, where you can go into detail about how employees are expected to behave towards each other and how the business deals with conflict.

In the long term, these measures could lead to a happier, more productive workforce and a more successful business.