“Conflict can destroy a team which hasn’t spent time learning to deal with it.” -Thomas Isgar
Conflict at Workplace and its effect on employees’ productivity is one of the serious issues that is faced by any organization today. The uniqueness of humans personalities, thought processes, interests, and beliefs often gives rise to conflicts. Thus, it’s no secret that conflict is a part of our day-to-day life. After home, employees spend most of their time at the workplace. Spending so much time with people of diversity and different outlooks often leads to clashes. Working in a conflicting environment causes stress, anxiety, and frustration among employees. It creates a hostile work environment coming in the way of employees’ productivity and creativity. Conflicts also lead to absenteeism and lower output of the employees. All of these factors eventually result in the low performance of the organization.
Understanding Workplace conflict and the Importance of Conflict Management
Conflict may occur at the individual level, group level, or organizational level. It’s important to have a clear understanding of workplace conflict to better prevent, and mitigate it.
In the words of Morton Deutsch, an American social psychologist, and researcher in conflict resolution, “A conflict occurs whenever incompatible activities occur. . .. An action that is incompatible with another action prevents, obstructs, interferes, injures, or in some way makes the latter less likely or less effective.”
Conflict can impair the efficiency and output of the employees, if taken the destructive discourse. Research shows the crippling effects of workplace conflicts. According to a study commissioned by CPP Inc.- publishers of the Myers-Briggs Assessment and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument - U.S. employees spend 2.1 hours per week involved with conflict, which amounts to approximately $359 billion in paid hours (based on average hourly earnings of $17.95), or the equivalent of 385 million working days. Employees cannot work in isolation; teamwork is what keeps a company going. And these statistics make it quite clear that no organization can flourish if there are ongoing conflicts. Here comes the indispensable need for Conflict Management in the workplace. What is conflict management though?
Conflict Management and its Importance
Simply defined, conflict management or conflict resolution involves a workplace that precludes conflicts wherein the management team takes an action plan aiming at the minimization of the effects of conflicts at all levels. With an efficient conflict management plan, an organization works to diminish the impacts of the negatives and focuses more on the positive outcome of the conflicting situations at hand. Conflict management also prioritizes creating an environment that prevents and avoids heated workplace issues. Effective conflict management is an essential need for the success of any organization.
Every manager and business leader should work on avoiding, preventing, and effectively managing conflicts in their workplace. Because if handled timely, a constructive conflict can bring teams closer with a better understanding of working relationships. In turn, leading to better collaboration and expression of employees.
Understandably, creating a plan to avoid and overcome clashes among so many employees in the organization is a daunting task. This is when you can take the assistance of our effective guide for conflict management. Taking the advantage of these professionally curated slides, organizations can create a toolkit to better manage conflicts at the organizations.
If you wish to conduct a comprehensive training for your team and colleagues on conflict management, access our training module here that will provide all the hands-on material you need to make for an effective experience.
Click here to access our Comprehensive Training Curriculum on Conflict Management
So, without further ado, let's go through these wonder slides.
# Identifying Conflicts
Template 1
Before creating a plan to manage and resolve the conflicts at your organization. It's indispensable to take an overview of the various conflicts that are existing in your organization currently. Taking the assistance of this PowerPoint slide, you can gather an overview of the conflicts prevailing in your organization. The pre-designed pie-chart contained in this PPT template showcases the stats for workplace conflicts in the form of interpersonal conflict, management practices, human resource, harassment, and discrimination-based conflicts. You can easily alter the text values in this slide, to showcase the data for conflicts occurring in your company.
Download What are Current Conflicts Existing Organization Template
Template 2
This PowerPoint slide showcases statistics that demonstrate the persistence of workplace conflicts. These statistics also let you determine how workplace conflicts get in the way of employees’ productivity and efficiency. Incorporating this layout, you can bring employees' and company management’s attention to the negative consequences of workplace conflict. By doing so, employees can be motivated to better resolve their clashes. Taking about conflicts an open work environment can be created in the company and if needed management can provide supervision for better team coherence and a cohesive work environment.
Download Statistics Related to Conflict in Workplace Template
# Analyzing Conflicts
Template 3
Taking advantage of this PowerPoint template, you can create a conflict management action plan for your business organization. This PPT template covers a pre-developed table which is divided into two sections. The first part of the table comprises the values for conflict identification while the second part works for issue treatment. Editing the text values of this action plan slide, you can record the number of clashes or heated events occurring in your company. Further, in the next column, you can record the action that can be taken to resolve the conflict. Then, moving forward to the issue treatment part, you can highlight the plan to manage the conflict along with the details of the person responsible for resolving the conflict. By doing so, you can keep a track of various potential issues that are existing in your business firm.
Download Conflict Management Action Plan Template
# Conflict Management Systems
Template 4
The PowerPoint slide displayed here illustrates the conflict management model. This model can be used by human resource professionals to create an action plan for resolving and managing workplace issues. It consists of four quadrants that depict the five major styles of conflict management, which are collaboration, completion, avoidance, accommodation, and compromise. You can determine the need for the required conflict management style on the points of assertive & non-cooperative, assertive & cooperative, non-assertive & non-cooperative, and non-assertive & cooperative. There is no right and wrong solution when it comes to dealing with the conflict but by establishing when and how to use the different conflict management styles, you can create an improved working environment for your employees.
Download Conflict Management Model Template
Template 5
This PowerPoint layout will assist you in creating an appropriate management style for handling workplace conflicts. The pre-designed table in this slide covers the content-ready sections namely conflicting style, description, the importance of use, trust between both parties, and involved limitations. Taking the assistance of this slide you can deal with the growth-impeding issues by determining the appropriate management style in terms of avoiding the conflict, accommodate, compromise, collaborate, or compete.
Download Selecting Appropriate Conflict Management Style at Workplace Template
Template 6
This PowerPoint layout talks about the various ways with which the company manager can avoid, prevent, reduce and resolve conflicts at the workplace. The showcased performing activities are namely:
- Employee Training and Development
- Regular Meetings and,
- Anonymous Suggestion Box.
By running these activities in your organization, you can create an open, civil and productive working environment. You can arrange the employee training programs, which can lead to better teamwork. Regular organizational and intra-team meetings will provide employees with a platform to voice out their opinions and concerns. An anonymous suggestion box is a feedback tool that will help the company manager to work on employees’ suggestions, issues, and needs.
Download Ways to Reduce Conflicts Template
# Helping Employees Handle Conflict
Template 7
This PowerPoint slide throws light upon various ways through which the company can aid employees in handling the prevalent conflicts. The listed services in this PPT slide are Face-to-Face Consultations, Personal/Family, Web-Based Education, and Self-Help Materials, Legal Consultations, etc. Incorporating this slide, you can utilize the finely-created table to list down as many services that can be provided to employees for conflict resolution. Further, you can choose and record the communication mode for the mentioned services. Lastly, you can ascertain the frequency with which the services will be provided to the employees.
Download Employee Conflict Prevention Template
Template 8
Workplace issues and arguments can sometimes turn ugly and violent. These critical situations can affect the overall well-being of the employees. Post-conflicts, organizations can run an employee assistance program to ensure that a healthy mental space can be achieved by their employees. This PPT template elucidates the various services with the communication mode, cost, and additional comments on the listed points. The highlighted services in this slide are Critical Incident Stress Debriefings (CISD), Consult On Workplace Violence, Offering Regulatory Compliance Services, etc. The human resource department of the company can work with the choices of services and can present various options with a cost estimate of the services to the managers with the below displayed PPT slide.
Download Employee Assistance Program Template
Template 9
This PPT layout shines a light on the employee conflict handling training program. This slide showcases the various programs that can make employees better capable of handling conflicting arguments and issues. All of these listed programs are further depicted on level 1 and level 2 along with the program costs. The training sessions mentioned in this PowerPoint layout are Active Listening, Mediation (Stage 1), Party Directed Mediation, etc. Understanding the needs of the employees, the company can craft an action plan for their employees. The company can also consult external agencies for training the employees.
Download Employee Conflict Handling Training Template
# Impact of Conflict Management
Template 10
This PPT slide showcases data that validates the successful run of conflict management at the workplace. The overall impact of conflict management illustrating the key benefits of the implementation of conflict management is depicted in this slide. This PPT layout showcases the positive outcomes of conflict management in terms of reduction in discrimination incidents, reduction in employee disengagements, reduction in workplace clashing, etc. Data for the reduction in these issues is also showcased.
Download Overall Impact of Conflict Management Template
Conclusion
The above displayed best 10 PowerPoint templates will fulfill the multi-fold functions of identifying, avoiding, reducing, and managing workplace conflicts. These PPT slides will also aid HR professionals in reporting managers, department-wise conflicts, and overall conflicts in the organizations. You will be glad to know that these easy-to-use templates are completely customizable. Also, you can use and save these PowerPoint graphics in the format of your choice. As, these layouts can be saved in PDF, PNG, JPG, etc. formats. Also, you can access these slides from anywhere in the world, because of their compatibility with Google Slides. So, what are you waiting for? Click on the links to easily download these readily-available templates. Do let us know about your experience of working with our products by commenting in the section below. We will be happy to hear from you!