Employee Conflict Policies: Managing Workplace Conflict

Employee conflict resolution is a must-have skill for managers in today’s labor market. Research by Gartner highlights that “Managers who manage, rather than silence, interpersonal conflict among employees will have an outsize positive impact on their organizations.” Then, there’s the work of influential organizational psychologist Adam Grant that highlights how conflict about tasks (as opposed to relationship conflict) can lead to better outcomes for businesses – including encouraging innovation and helping teams avoid overconfidence. (Read Think Again for more on this) 

In other words, businesses that support healthy employee conflict and manage more harmful relationship conflicts are poised to better succeed in today’s competitive landscape. And while these interpersonal skills can be developed by managers through training and practice, an employee conflict policy plays a critical role too. 

What is an Employee Conflict Policy? 

An employee conflict policy is a set of guidelines and procedures designed to address and resolve conflicts that arise amongst its workforce. It creates and documents a framework for managing employee conflicts, ranging from disagreements about the distribution of work through to more challenging issues, like addressing some microaggressions. 

It is seen as a key tool in a psychologically safe workplace. 

It’s also important to recognize what it isn’t: it isn’t an appropriate mechanism to ‘resolve’ harassment or discrimination. There should be separate policies and complaint procedures in place to deal with this more serious misconduct – and employees who have experienced harassment or discrimination should not be encouraged to ‘resolve’ their complaints directly with the other party. 

How can an Employee Conflict Policy help?

A Proactive, Not Reactive Approach to Conflict 

While conflict can have a bad reputation, conflict at work can be quite healthy and very beneficial for organizations – if it’s well managed.  

Creating and sharing an employee conflict policy can help build and manage a culture of healthy and respectful conflict at work. It can outline what’s acceptable in terms of conflict at work (ie. Critically considering someone’s work, pointing out issues or challenges, or highlighting inefficiencies). Equally, it should note what’s not acceptable: ie. Swearing, attacking someone for personal characteristics, or bullying. Ideally, it could highlight examples of healthy task conflict in contrast to bullying and harassment.   

Reduced Employee Turnover and Improved Morale

Interpersonal issues can and do lead to employee churn. Companies that publish and follow employee conflict policies show that they are committed to employee well-being and satisfaction, fairness, transparency, and inclusion. 

Helpfully, these policies can also encourage employees to speak up earlier. This facilitates early intervention and resolution which, in turn, can improve morale and create a more positive workplace atmosphere. 

Skill Development

To be frank, many individuals aren’t well-equipped to handle interpersonal conflict. It’s a skill – and it’s not something we’re all inherently good at.

Practising resolving conflicts at work, using the employee conflict policy as a framework, helps your employees to develop highly valuable conflict resolution skills.

What To Include in an Employee Conflict Policy

It’s important to remember that legal documents are most effective when they’re developed and used as business documents. What this means is that they should be tailored to fit the company they’re being developed for. 

That said, broadly speaking, employee conflict policies may include the following clauses: 

• The definition of conflict, including common examples. 
• Reporting mechanisms and channels, including information about the appropriate roles to report conflict to. 
• Confidentiality provisions, if any. 
• No retaliation clauses, highlighting that employees who report conflict will not be retaliated against. 
• Conflict resolution procedures. 
• Communication expectations, including acceptable and unacceptable language and demeanour. 
• Feedback provisions, detailing how employees can submit feedback about how they feel their conflict was handled. 
• Discipline for policy violations 
• You may also wish to offer conflict resolution training to employees and managers. 

Given that it should be created as a business document too, you might also consider including the following provisions in your employee conflict policy: 

1. Purpose statement, noting that the purpose of the policy is to encourage task conflict to promote innovation, reduce absenteeism, and encourage diversity in thinking.  
2. The better employee conflict policies we see reflect the core values of the organization, prioritizing things like respect, collaboration, and open communication. The policy acts less like a set of rules of engagement for fired up workers and more as a tool for shaping the workplace culture, especially in the context of challenging interactions.  
3. Roles and responsibilities for people engaged in conflict, including when to escalate matters to supervisors, managers, or more senior leadership.  
4. The different types of conflict that your organization would expect to (and perhaps even like to) see.  

Distributing The Employee Conflict Policy 

As with all employment-related policies, this one should be provided during the onboarding process and then routinely referred to at appropriate intervals. Some common triggers for redistributing the employee conflict policy are:  

• Annually, shared via an email. We suggest making the policy more relevant to your team members by highlighting ‘wins’ that came from your team using and abiding by the policy.  

• Via leaders and managers if they are approached by team members who are experiencing and/or struggling to navigate a healthy, task conflict.  

Ideally, your company should get to a point where all your team members are comfortable citing the policy and calling out non-compliant communication and conflict styles. This will likely only happen if they receive these cues about your company’s culture from the top-down, however.   

The Importance of Consulting with Legal Counsel

As we outlined above, there is a risk that discrimination and/or harassment could be inappropriately managed through an employee conflict framework. It’s crucial that legal counsel is consulted to draft the document in such a way that makes it clear which conflicts can and should be resolved through these processes, and which should be formally investigated.

Additionally, your legal counsel will be well-placed to outline how and when managers and team members should document conversations and communications surrounding employee conflicts. These documents are critical in the event of any future claims relating to harassment, discrimination and/or a hostile work environment.

If you want to discuss creating an employee conflict policy at your company, reach out. Our employment attorneys are available to help.

• Employment Law