Employee relations issues are the day-to-day occurrences in the working environment among employees, friends, family members, strangers, and even employer. They may be positive or negative leading to workplace violence.
Workplace violence may involve physical violence, threats, insults, molestation, intimidation, or any act that disrupts peaceful environment at workplace (The USDA Handbook on Workplace Violence Prevention and Response, 1998).
Such issues arise when employees are not equipped with the right methods of solving the matters arising in their work place. The probability of work place violence is always high since people spend most of their time at workplace, exercising teamwork in most activities.
According to the National Security and intelligence Unit in America and Canada, statistics have shown that the fastest growing crime is workplace violence. This is not only happening in the US but all over the world. Murder cases have been reported many times resulting from work place violence, making the level of security at workplaces wanting.
The following essay will cover on the employee relations issues and the potential reasons for workplace violence whose major cause may be interpersonal conflict and management decisions among others.
Interpersonal conflict
Interpersonal conflict refers to a situation where colleagues in a work place or an employer and his junior collide, and they may not be getting along well. Most people in workstations spend so much time conflicting amongst themselves, avoiding conflicts, or recovering from conflicts. It includes bullying, intimidation, harassment, competition among workers among others.
Interpersonal conflicts in workstations may lead to stress since colleagues spend the better part of the day together. It may also lead to physical violence when a solution is not found on time. Below are some of the reasons that lead to interpersonal conflicts at work.
Sharing of work among colleagues may lead to conflict whereby some employees feel that their partners are not contributing enough to a share of work given. Other interpersonal conflict arises when employees feel that there is no one to run to in times of conflict especially when senior personnel collides with his/her junior.
Different professional groups working in the same unit may also be a source of interpersonal conflict where by one team suffers form superiority complex and intimidate or harass the other group. This is mostly evident in the medical professions where doctors always look down upon nurses thus resulting into conflict.
If job description is not clearly outlined to the workers, conflict with the supervisor may arise when one does not accomplish what is expected of him/her or between employees when blaming each other on a piece of work not done. At times, the workload may be beyond the employee ability, where by their leader are not sensitive and they give them deadlines to meet the targets (Hoel & Giga, 2006, pg 17).
Interpersonal conflict may really affect the quality of services offered by the employees to a company or their effectiveness to their expected work. This is because it reduces workers morale thus affecting their productivity. It is recommended that issues of interpersonal conflict should be dealt with to keep workers at ease in their workstations in order for them to give the best results.
Identifying signs of work place violence
The best method to curb employee relation conflict and workplace conflict is through dealing with the problem when it is still young. This is because most physical and psychological violence is not a one-day process but it begins with a small issue and builds up with time until it explodes.
However, not all violent occasions show signs of exploding since some people are hot tempered generally, others may keep issues without showing signs at all while other situations do not give a chance of psychological preparation.
Signs of violence may lie in different categories such as personal stress and social isolation and may be in different stages. The following are some of the signs that may help an employer or employees know that things are not right.
Failure to cooperate with the colleagues and the supervisor, spreading rumors to deliberately hurt someone, frequent argument with the other employees, sudden drug addiction, short temperament, rudeness, family issues like death, divorce, ever talking about violence, giving threats and swearing negatively, procession of arms, absenteeism and lateness, unsatisfactory work quality, complains on unfair treatment, blame games, social isolation, among others.
The concerned people should not allow these signs to go beyond manageable levels in order to maintain an ample working environment.
Reasons for workplace violence
Causes of work place violence may be classified in to different categories, which include economic, political, societal, psychological, and organizations issues (Pell, 2003). The major cause of violence at work place is interpersonal conflict although issues like anger about disciplinary action and involuntary termination or layoff may contribute a great deal to violence.
Economic issues that may raise unrest in a company include retrenchment, which may be because of advanced technology whereby machines reduce the need for workers or when a company is restructuring. Others include modernization, unemployment, and overstressed population.
Employees never take termination of work and layoffs kindly, and this in most cases ends up in conflict, damage of property and even homicide. Some employees blame others on this and may hold grudges and even threaten the security of the others.
The lifestyle of a society can also facilitate conflict in work places. For instance, the kind of movies people watch and music entails a lot of violence thus tuning the mindset of people to a violent oriented society. Furthermore, procession of guns has been legalized in many part of the world, making it even more difficult to curb violence.
Violence has been taken to be the easiest way of solving problems in the society starting from fractured families, mob justice among others. Nevertheless, the society has been overwhelmed by drug abuse, which has ruined the ability of peoples to solve problems logically (Morris, 2008)
The psychological issues that may trigger conflict in a company may be misunderstanding or hatred among employees, competition, jealousy, when the manager favors or is against a particular employee, sexual harassment among others. When there is hatred among employees in a workstation, there is always a tendency of violence between them.
Favoritism from the management may also cause the other employees to conflict with their employer or the employee who is getting favors. In other cases, some managers harass their employees sexually in order to retain them at work or for promotions reasons. These and many other psychological reasons may end up in conflict among the employees or even with their employer (Morris, 2008; Pell, 2003).
The organizational structure is a key area in employee relation issues and workplace violence. For instance, some organizations create a lot of pressure to its employees on meeting some set targets failure to which can cause a lot of conflict between the employer and the employee.
Some of these targets are hard to hit and are at times he determinant of whether the employee will get his/her salary or not. Other factors include too much supervision, very authoritative supervisors who undermine the dignity and the work of their juniors, favoritism towards some employees, warnings to be secretive concerning the organization among others (Pell, 2003).
There are three factors that facilitate workplace violence: First, there must be an employee who begins the violent action; secondly, there must be a reason as to why that employee chose to solve a certain issue the violent way; and finally, their working environment must probably be facilitating violence especially in cases where there is no intervention (Heathfield, 2010).
Lack of proper strategies in most companies to curb violent related issues may trigger violence in the company. When conflict arises in a company and no intervention is done, the issue may build up with time and finally end up in violence. This happens when it is clear to the employees that their employer is either less concerned or their code of ethics does not facilitate for the same.
Some employers assume that violence cannot happen in their area of jurisdiction thus they do not train their employees on means to assess potential violent conditions nor do they gauge the behaviors of the employees to determine their potential to be violent.
They fail to enact policies to address violent situations. This lack of support from the employer gives the violent employees will to exercise their bad behaviors since they know that there is no consequence and penalty of their bad conduct (Morris, 2008).
When a company is not having adequate employees, there may arise conflict between them blaming each other on efficiency to do the expected work. This is because the work may be beyond their ability and their effort to work harder may not be bearing fruits.
Still, the employer may be giving them pressure to finish the work, which may be more than their share resulting to conflict with the employer. Understaffing may also build up pressure to the worker due to overworking thus changing their mind set and making them violent (Pell, 2003)
Disciplinary actions in an organization or a company may cause violence between the employer and the subject. Some employees respond violently when they fail to adhere to the company policy and they face disciplinary action. Instead of understanding that the employer has to implement the policies, the subject assumes that it is a personal beef and may go ahead conflicting on revenge mission.
Political issues may at times trigger conflict in a company. This happens mostly when employees are so attached to the political system of a country or when the political arena influences the management of the company.
Conflicts mostly arise when colleagues are discussing the political issues and becoming emotionally attached. There are also organizational politics whereby people vie for certain positions and people may differ depending on their camps. Tribalism and racism is closely associated to politics when it affects the well-being of a company.
Cost of conflict and violence
Conflict at work place may turn out to be very expensive phenomena to the company as well as the family and the society in general. Violence may lead to murder thus putting the employee’s life in danger. For instance, in the year 2000, Michael McDermott of Edgewater Technology, an internet company in Wakefield Massachusetts murdered seven employees in eight minutes due to work related issues.
Among financial related problems, workplace conflict can lead to employees quitting job thus lowering the total output of a company. This will also cost the company in retraining new employees and giving the golden handshake as the employee leaves.
When the company is involved in court issues, it may use a lot of money to finance the lawyers and fines involved. Other financial related issues include paying employees off work due to conflict, compensations and health premiums incase of physical injury.
Both the employer and the employee in violent related cases lose a lot of time. Whenever a conflict arises in an organization, the employer must spend time solving the matter of which he could be using this time to better the welfare of the company. When employees get involved in conflict, they may be affected such that their performance deteriorates or may deliberately slow down work.
When the relationship among the employees is not good, tension and stress builds up and so much time is lost due to divided concentration on the expected task. Employees may spend time discussing the issue or doing other things like playing computer games, listening to music, calling friends as a way to ease the tension (Lightsey, n.d).
Conflict in workplace may cause illness and absenteeism. When employees get involved in physical violence, they may be injured thus need to seek medical help. Illness may also be a result of work related stress due to poor interpersonal relations.
Others may deliberately skip work as they try to avoid encounters with colleagues they are not in good terms with. This reduces the total output of the company and leads to use of finances to cater for medical bills (Lightsey, n.d).
Decision-making is usually affected by conflict especially when the parties involved are members of the decision making body. Quality decision making is always facilitated by free conversations without any form of tension or hidden agenda.
When conflict comes in, the result is competition and power struggle leading to very uninformed decisions which may affect the future of a company a great deal. Some people in the decision making panel may even withhold information, make wrong decisions or abandon decision making due to anger (Lightsey, n.d).
The company may opt to reshuffle or transfer employees due to conflicts to minimize their encounters. The resulting combination may be less efficient since they may lack the attributes of the first combination, which may have been done carefully.
Instances of theft and loss of property and information is also common in conflict-based scenarios. This is usually common when the employees collide with their employers and are in a revenge mission. Some employers may also get away with companies property or information as a trap for an enemy employee who may be responsible over them.
How to manage workplace violence
Every company should have a structured plan of how to deal with employee issues and violence at work place. Work place violence results from small issues, which may build up with time resulting to physical or psychological violence. Thus, the best strategy to deal with workplace violence is identifying the small issues and dealing with them before they explode.
The company’s rules and regulation should include disciplining of any employee involved in conflict or violent behaviors including termination of work. The policy should show clearly, what entails violence in the company. These rules should be fully operational with zero tolerance of violent behavior and this way, the employees will always be careful and will exercise self-control when situations tempt them to be violent (Morris, 2008).
For example, in 1987, an Amtrak employee was observed with violent behaviors towards his colleagues but no action was taken. Later on, he shot and seriously wounded his supervisor of which, if he were disciplined during the first scenario, he would have been cautious from then on and this mess could not have happened.
The military, one of the most disciplined team in the world has a very strong policy concerning interpersonal conflict and the consequences (Pell, 2003, pg 320).
Proper background check should always be conducted to the potential employees before job confirmation. This gives the employer a better image of the person he/she is absorbing in to the workstation and people with a history of violent conduct should not be considered. By doing so, the employer will have reduced the chances of employees colliding since proper evaluation of each persons character was done prior to employment.
For instance, a certain rent-a-car company employed someone without considering his background. Later on, this person raped a co-worker, only to realize that, this person had served three years in jail before for robbery with violence (Morris, 2008).
Every workstation should have a committee to deal with conflict and violence in the work place. Every issue should be represented in the committee to ensure that issues are dealt with using the right procedure.
The important issues to be represented in such committees include psychological issues, human resources, legal, social, security among others. This gives the employees an easier way to solve conflict issues and minimizes instances of violence in a workstation (Morris, 2008).
Training is a very vital key that can help curb employee relations issues. A company should do extensive training on their employees concerning what is expected of them before they pick up their duties.
There should be seminars and counseling sessions to the employees regularly to be able to deal with the changes in the society. The company should also employ the right professionals for the right positions to prevent discontentment among them.
The managerial team should work towards maintaining a positive and productive working environment free from inappropriate behaviors from their employees.
Such an environment can be achieved by taking the staff through training and mentoring programmes, facilitating open and free communication, regular feedbacks and performance reviews, addressing employee related issues fairly and promptly, and empowering the employees by engaging them in decision making and other company related activities.
This gives the employees a sense of belonging to the company and makes towards building the image and the values of the company (Pell, 2003)
When some people have to be laid off or retrenched, they should be well prepared in order to part with the company peacefully. It may be important to support them financially and psychologically in order to avoid harsh impact on the changes. The employer should let the employee understand the reason behind restructuring and may allow them to give their opinions.
Conclusion
Statistics in America and Canada show that workplace violence is the fastest growing crime in the US and this may apply to the world in general. The most common employee relation issue is interpersonal conflict where by workers may collide among themselves or conflict may arise between a junior and a senior employee.
Interpersonal conflict may not necessarily originate at work but may be a carried forward issue probably family, social, or political.
Managers should be careful to check on the possibility of crime among the employees right from recruitment and through out their life in service of the company. Conflicts should be solved early enough to reduce on the cost and consequences. Managers should be well equipped with social and psychological studies in order to tackle the problem at ease.
They should create a conducive environment avert their attention to the smooth running of the company rather than emphasizing on conflict.
This may be facilitated through involving everyone in the company in decision-making rather than imposing rules on them, encouraging teamwork, proper prior training, and holding seminars and mentorship programmes. Generally, employee relations issues and workplace violence is a major area in every company and should be handled with due diligence.
References
Heathfield, S. (2010). Workplace Violence. Web.
Hoel, H. & Giga, S. (2006) Destructive Interpersonal Conflict in the Workplace: The Effectiveness of Management Interventions. Web.
Lightsey, A. Some Costs of Workplace Conflicts. Web.
Morris, J. (2008). Violence in the Workplace-A growing problem in America. Web.
Pell, A. R. (2003). The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Managing People. NY: Marie Butler-Knight. Web.
The USDA Handbook on Workplace Violence Prevention and Response. (1998). Workplace Violence. Web.