Continue from Part 1
: Cost and Losses
I know of one organization (among many, anyway) where the atmosphere of people eating an uncanned drink is rare because of stinking hatred occasioned by Conflicts, striving, and quarrel. In this organization, the management is daft and adamant about managing conflicts or intervening, or even doing the least: Resolve Conflicts. What that management thinks they know is, it doesn’t concern them, their work is going on. But that management is wrong. They can’t be getting the expected output. Work can bind people, just like sharing a society as citizens or indigenous people, but Conflicts can severe whichever people. So, when work is going on, and Conflicts exist, know that there is a severance force to performance index, productivity, and effectiveness. The worst hit here is efficiency.
Conflicts impair Productivity and mars Efficiency. For instance, when your staff or people are in Conflicts situations, it saps their energy and makes them withdraw their best inputs. So, address conflicts. What I’m saying can apply to associations, clubs, unions even the larger society like a nation. So, scale it to your situation. Resolve conflict within a group as quickly and honestly as possible.
There are losses when this unresolved conflict is the case such as;
- Lost productivity or Lost In Productivity
- Lack of team initiatives – Team initiatives are stifled.
- Employees fail to facilitate each other’s work because of strives.
- Time wasted by employees wrangling with each other, talking to sympathizers to secure pity, and brooding over and about problems
- Employees’ “I don’t care” attitudes rise.
- Direct Costs on Use of Resources
- Expensive equipment like plant and other equipment carelessly treated, vandalized, stolen
- Overpayments due to lack of due diligence and poor discussion of purchasing or hiring decisions
- Cash crisis (possible bankruptcy or poor sale) due to failure to plan owing to loss of interest occasioned by strive.
- Perception costs
- Lost customers through indiscipline, discourtesy, or poor service.
- Your employees transfer their aggression and grievances to the customers.
- Reduced attractiveness of the company to investors
- Reduced credibility to bankers and other creditors as a result of the above.
- Legal costs
- Prolonged deliberation over succession, estate, restructuring plans, matters that could not be resolved internally, etc.
- Prolonged debates and time wastages while professional advisors’ clocks are ticking
- Advice on dealing with threats of litigation
- Litigation itself (plaintiff and/or defense)
- Costs of not having the best people in the right jobs [perhaps most painful]
- Replacing key employees who leave due to conflict
- Keeping poorer employees when better ones can’t be hired because of conflict
- Private compensation by the owner to make things “fair” to family members not employed in the business.
The truth is: No one can resolve every interpersonal conflict amicably, but no one sleeps on with conflict ravaging.
Mike Ihezuo can help you with Conflicts Management, Discipline and Grievances Management, Mediation, and Reconciliations, anytime, any day for organizations, government, churches, clubs, and Individuals.
