Avoiding Conflict With Your Staff
Every company, irrespective of its size or composition, faces the significant challenge of managing its employees effectively and avoiding conflict. How a company handles conflict between staff members and management and between staff members themselves can have a huge impact on staff morale, company profits and overall productivity.
Conflict is one of the major causes of a reduction in staff turnover in any business and is detrimental to a company in terms of costs. There are many factors which can cause conflict with your employees. These include breached agreements between employees and management, lack of information or misinformation, discrimination or harassment, personality style, organisational problems and scarce resources.
Avoiding staff conflict caused by such problems involves managing a raft of complicated human resource policies and getting to grips with an ever-changing mountain of legislation. This can result in a mountain of paperwork as well as taking your attention away from your company’s core activities and processes which in turn effects its overall focus.
Hiring an industrial relations consultant is the best way to address staff conflicts and to help companies to work out suitable industrial relations strategies. With their fingers on the pulse, an industrial relations consultant knows exactly how the system works and is aware of all the relevant legislation. This eliminates the need for you to deal with the minutiae of every staff conflict and allows you to focus on what you do best.
An industrial relations consultant can address all manner of staff conflicts which can arise through a variety of different ways. They can help a company make impartial decisions based on the facts before them, to identify their rights and obligations as employers and to protect the company from any potentially expensive and litigious actions. Most importantly, an industrial relations consultant can help a company to nip any staff conflict problems in the bud before they manifest and spiral out of control. By effectively managing human resources for a company in this way, an industrial relations consultant can ensure that your company is not adversely affected by its staff conflicts.
The hiring of an industrial relations consultant can help you develop long term industrial relations strategies for your company that align with your business plans. In this way, you can achieve a competitive advantage that is both sustainable and maintainable through the development of an engaged and motivated workforce. In addition, hiring an industrial relations consultant can help you bridge the gap that can exist between a company and its staff by building a long-term human resource strategy and creating relationships that create prosperity for all. This is achieved by engaging employees and promoting participation in the workplace.
As well as managing staff conflict, an industrial relations consultant can also look after the drafting of your human resources documentation, your company’s occupational health and safety audits and can liaise with trade unions and lobbyists on your behalf. Using their communication and leadership skills, relationship building skills and influencing skills, an industrial relations consultant can help you to initiate change.
About the author:
David Dunne is an online marketing consultant and blogger writing on behalf of Adare Human Resource Management in Dublin, Ireland.