How to Develop Business Policies to Resolve Staff Conflicts

Every major company experiences growing pains as it trains to maintain a top-flight staff, profits and its ethical standards. Staff members may encounter conflicts of interest or opportunities to advance their careers through unethical behavior in their daily work. You need to develop procedures to resolve staff conflicts before they cause irreparable harm to your company.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Educational programs and training
• Mediator
• Report of events
• Legal counsel for employees
• Personnel files
• Mediation location
• Digital audio recorder
• Video recorder

Mediate Issues Among Employees Through Official Channels

1. Require mediators to review past ethical issues among staff members involved in a complaint. Your business ethics policies need to begin with an understanding of each party's past to determine their approaches to company standards.
2. List neutral locations for mediators to resolve staff conflicts without the tensions of the workplace. You can outline legal offices, conference centers and other facilities in your ethics policies to make all parties involved comfortable.
3. Instruct managers and other mediating parties to lay out ground rules for civil discussion before resolving staff conflicts. Mediation should begin with a discussion of proper discourse, including a request to address the opposing party and a prohibition of inappropriate language.
4. Request a complete and unabridged report of events from each party involved as part of your policy toward business ethics. Your mediators should allow the complaining party to begin and forbid interruptions until each person has completed his version of the events.
5. Jot down notes in the personnel file of each participant in a business ethics complaint. These notes should be devoid of subjectivity and offer a complete third-person account of mediation and resolution.
6. Ensure that the ethics policies you develop adhere to whistle-blower laws at the state and federal level. Employees who want to bring ethical lapses to light are allowed legal counsel during mediation to protect their rights.
7. Install a clause within your business ethics policy to address unresolved issues among staff members. Many companies require a transfer or termination based on the number and severity of ethical issues over a certain period of time.
8. Address common ethical issues brought up by staff conflicts through company-wide educational programs. You should develop a series of departmental meetings to break ethics training into smaller bites for busy employees.

Tips & Warnings

• Record your meetings with staff members to capture statements objectively as you resolve staff conflicts. A digital audio recorder and a video recorder provide depth to personnel documents regarding ethical conflicts. The presence of these devices needs to be made clear to all parties involved to avoid privacy complaints, and the recordings should be replayed after the meeting for full disclosure.