Employee relations and conflict

Workplace conflict remains a fact of organisational life and needs to be managed positively and proactively. Individual and ‘unorganised conflict’, in the form of sickness absence, bullying or harassment, and employee turnover, can be just as harmful and costly to an organisation as organised industrial action on a collective level. According to CIPD research on managing conflict in the workplace, conflict at work is a ‘common occurrence’ according to a quarter of employees, with one in five employers saying the same. Many staff have experienced some form of interpersonal conflict at work, either an isolated dispute or incident of conflict or an ongoing difficult relationship.

The CIPD’s Good Work Index shows the quality of people’s working lives in the UK continues to fall short on a number of key measures - poor wellbeing and stress, lack of development, high workloads and lack of work life balance being some of the issues at play. These factors will have a major bearing on the employee relations in workplaces and will increase the potential for conflict. The report highlights that existing inequalities in job quality have remained, while remote working and furlough have introduced new challenges and complexity. So, employers should work to ensure that good work and positive employee relations are a reality.

Employee relations therefore remains an important concept for organisations. For example:

• Managers need the skills to be the effective people managers that are essential to a successful employment relationship.
• Employers need to train and support line managers in areas such as teamworking and change management as the basis for establishing and maintaining motivation and commitment. Managing the employment relationship rests heavily on the shoulders of line managers, but their competence in this area is often seriously neglected, with many employers failing to see employee relations and conflict management as a strategic issue.
• The increased popularity of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) techniques such as early neutral evaluation and mediation to resolve workplace differences show an important shift from the traditional industrial relations framework. The traditional approach tended to emphasise formal discipline and grievance procedures, but ADR represents more of a ‘win-win’ approach, aiming to halt conflict at an early stage.
• Trade unions remain a strong presence in the public sector. This is partly through the existence of institutions of collective consultation, reinforced by continued reliance in many cases on industry-level bargaining and the public policy emphasis on partnership.