How to Successfully Solve Employee Disputes

When you're a manager only a small portion of your job is running the company and supervising employees, when you're overseeing workers you'll also have to spend time resolving disputes between them.  It doesn't matter if you’re the owner of a large company like Alex F Bouri or if you're running a small family business, if you have a position of power you'll eventually have to handle some sort of problem between workers.  If you find that you're constantly having to handle problems between employees you may feel more like a baby sitter than a boss, but there are ways to quickly resolve disputes and hopefully prevent others from happening.

Don't Ignore Problems

You may think the Rachel in accounting is complaining about a trivial matter when she tells you that someone in sales stealing her coffee creamer, but it doesn't seem that way to her.  If employees are coming to with you problems that you write off as small or unimportant, that will guarantee that employees will take it upon themselves to deal with the issue.  Take every employee problem seriously and them know that it's important to you, if not you could have problems when they try to solve it themselves the wrong way.

Mediate Immediately

As soon as you find out about the conflict between employees, you need to start taking proactive steps to solve this.  This doesn't mean that you have to confront the employees in question ASAP, but you should at least be thinking of ways to successfully solve the issue at hand.  This can be anything from reviewing company policies on employee disputes or asking people in upper management about the best way to solve the problem.

Follow Up

This is without a doubt the most important part of handling problems at the office.   While you were mediating a conflict the employees in question may have promised to change their behavior, but after they leave your private office the problems could start up again like nothing ever happened.  If you don't follow up with the employees  you don't know if any changes have been made.  Along with keeping an eye on their behavior, ask other employees or managers if they've noticed any positive changes as well.