Dealing with workplace difficulties can be a tricky business. On an ongoing basis, there may always be a staff issue that you have to take care of. From a compliance and the legislation perspective, it’s important to have your core procedures in place. The key is that you deal with the issue, and you deal with it quickly and that you have an informal approach.
Steps to Deal with a Complaint
The most important thing is to deal with the complaint straight away. Quite often a staff member has spoken to their manager or spoken to their supervisor, they may have spoken to other people and nobody has dealt with it. This may be because they either don’t want to or they don’t know how address the issue.
The first thing to do is to put some sort of a timescale in place and get back to the person. Then try implementing an informal process and see can it be resolved. And more than likely the staff member will be happy to do that.
The easiest way to deal with conflicts or complaints is informally. This means no escalation and no written reports; nothing like that until you really explored every possibility to deal with it unceremoniously in the first instance. If it’s a case of staff complaining about each other, the relationship will stay intact if you find an informal way to deal with it and to have a successful outcome that benefits the parties. Meet with the person, explore what the issues are, agree on an outcome, record what you’ve spoken about, review it and meet again. This simple process should resolve conflicts most of the time. If not, there’s a formal mechanism within your grievance procedure.
Keeping Conflicts to a Minimum
There are three ways. Firstly, work on awareness:
- One: Ensure that your staff are aware of what the expectations are and what’s acceptable in the workplace and what isn’t acceptable.
- Two: Establish staff charters earlier on. This is a useful way of mapping out what you expect from your staff members. It’s important to ensure that that happens at the induction stage, to set out not only the job description and specifications, but also the behaviours that are acceptable and unacceptable.
And finally, have a system in place to deal with complaints if they come up.
