Cost of Unmanaged Conflict in Your Workplace

This is a crucial time for organizations to pay attention to their markets, their bottom lines, and their people — challenging for sure when every decision carries extra weight in uncertain economic times.

In terms of your most important asset — your talent — it may be time to assess how the “new” organizational culture will operate. Factors of retention, productivity, engagement and morale rank high in an environment where every dollar counts.

The driving force behind a positive, productive organizational culture is one that leadership often misses: the power of constructive conflict.  While not all conflicts are healthy to a workplace, constructive conflict, well understood, welcomed and managed, can become a powerful business tool to build strong, high-performing teams and a culture that supports your people. 

Conflict will always exist, and there are positive and negative outcomes from conflict depending upon how it is managed.  Creativity and innovation are deeply affected by how a work team deals with conflicting ideas and tasks. A workplace environment in which creativity, trust, and open communication are managed can boost and sustain employee performance, engagement, and positive work attitudes.

Make no mistake, just because your workforce may not be in physical proximity to each other in the current WFH environment, there still is room for negative conflict to happen, especially with uncertainty and change stirring up people’s stress and anxiety, two components of negative conflict in interpersonal relationships.

Is conflict helping or hurting your workplace culture?

There are real costs associated with the negative outcomes of conflict AND there are costs that come from not being able to turn conflict into positive results. These are just some of the measurable, significant conflict costs we see in our work and in the data we researched:

• WASTED TIME - lower productivity, motivation and morale; higher absenteeism, sick leave, health costs.

• WASTED OPPORTUNITY - loss of customers, degraded decision quality, market entry delay, erosion of shareholder value and diminished funding potential.

• STAFF TURNOVER - costs in severance/termination packages; recruitment, restaffing, reallocating work, training and development, loss of human capital investment in skilled employees, loss of opportunity for billable hours during transition and training.

• REPUTATION AND LOSS OF SUPPORT - compromised reputation, bad press; fees and time associated with inside and/or outside support from mediators, therapists, counselors, specialty trainers, and other conflict crisis managers.

How can you assess the presence of negative or positive conflict in your workplace? 

We offer a simple, free tool that measures and puts a dollar value on the negative outcome of conflicts. It’s called the Cost of Conflict Calculator™.

This valuable tool estimates what the team has spent so far and how much it will spend in the future on unproductive outcomes from conflict. It outputs easily measured solid $ costs that are based on industry research and the users’ custom answers. Based on nine questions, the most common and largest dollar value costs are calculated.

The results allow you to look at negative outcomes from conflict in a new way, and take some actionable measures to improve the quality of your retention strategies. Features of the Conflict Calculator™:

• Calculates Multiple Costs

• Outputs Past, Current and Future Expenditures

• Instant Online Results

• No Sign-in Required

• Confidential

• Full Report Feature

• FREE to Use

Your custom answers to the questions you submit will help you pinpoint the hot spots in your business that are costing you money now, and will definitely cost more down the road if negative conflict continues unmitigated.

I see too many situations where an organization has swept brewing conflict under the rug only to become a costly elephant in the room — costs that no business need during these times. So, I invite you to use this tool to support you in making sound decisions to help your business come out of the pandemic situation even stronger than before. 

Whether or not you use this tool, I encourage you to take some kind of steps to evaluate your workplace environment to make sure it embraces constructive conflict. You team is your most important investment. To use that creativity and talent by harnessing the power of conflict, let’s have a conversation.