Scenario
As the manager of a department, you have noticed a lot of tension and arguments between your employees. The disagreements have been about work and personal issues. Julie has been a model employee for more than a year. In the past month, she has been late to work six times. You have noticed her checking her cell phone for messages very frequently, and she has been visiting non-work-related websites on her computer. Coping with work conflicts such as these has created an increased amount of stress in your life.
Write a paper of approximately 750 words that answers the following questions:
- How do you identify and approach the different conflicts occurring within your department?
- On which issues are you going to counsel, manage, and correct the behaviors of your employees? Outline your action plan for Julie. If you feel no action on your part is needed, explain why.
- How are you going to manage your increased stress?
- What policies and procedures can you put into place to help you and your team succeed?
- Include a minimum of two sources,
Managing Conflict and Stress – Sample Solution
Introduction
Conflict is a common phenomenon among people of different mind working to share similar scarce resources. Conflict normally happens when two or more individual cannot agree on something. In the workplace, conflict normally results to wastage of the time and development of tension among workers. It spoils the work environment, undermining the work morale in the workplace. In this regard it is important for the human resource manager to take control of the situation and manage the conflict to curb its interference with the organization performance
Conflict Management
Conflict can be identified by watching people’s behaviors and how they interact with each other. Workers normally have a way of interacting with each other and behaving respectfully to word each other. Sometimes workers are required to team up to complete a certain task, especially when a task has to go through different stages to be completed. A manager can identify that a conflict exist among workers if there is unusual behavior such as uncompleted work that requires collaboration and the workers blaming each other for this. This is a sign that there is a conflict. Thus a manager can identify conflict by identifying work loopholes, tension, abusive or sarcastic language, and unnecessary arguments which are hardly resolved (Wood, n.d.).
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To resolve these conflicts, the manager requires organizing a meeting with all workers who seems to be having a conflict. The meeting should focus on identifying the root course of the conflict. In this part of the meeting, the manager should focus on digging out the main course of the conflict by allowing the two sides to speak out and give their side of the story. The manager should then look past the incident, by probing the workers involved to assist them in defining the real problem that will need to be resolved to end the conflict. The manager should then make the conflicting parties to identify the best solution that they think can address the problem. The conflicting parties should be able to identify the best way to make things work more effectively. With this, the manager should mentor the conflicting parties to define a workable solution that suits the two fighting parties. This includes the procedures that should be followed to ensure the problem has been effectively resolved. The manager should then make the two parties to resolve their conflicts by apologizing and forgiving each other by shaking hands (Ratnieks et al., 2006).
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Counseling Workers Behaviors
The manager is required guide the employees on how they are required to behave and manage the organization time and resources. They also need to be guided on the use of personal phones during work time and visiting non-work related site. This should be recognized as wastage of the company’s resources and the manager should make it clear that a disciplinary action should employed in case one is found doing do. Workers will also be expected to respect their work and each other to enhance their team work. Workers should work as per their work descriptions and remain within their set objectives. The work performance appraisal should be introduced to ensure that workers operate as anticipated and work to enhance the organization productivity, and not to promote personal businesses while in the workplace
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Julie Action Plan
Julie behavior has changed of late demonstrating change of interest and lack of the required attention to her job. She keeps stealing the employer’s time by doing other personal businesses during work hours. The manager should counsel Julie about her role in the organization and how she is anticipated to behave and to use her time in the organization. Julie will be guided on her duties in the organization and warned against using the organization time and resources to accomplish personal businesses.
Managing Increased Stress
To manage the increased work stress the manager should first recognize the presence and the cause of stress. The manager should then define measures to resolve the sources of stress in a manner that he will be able to ease the working process. For instance in this case, the source of stress could easily be conflict among workers and lack of work commitment. To resolve this, the manager should clearly define the roles of each worker and set the milestones for their work to ensure that no worker gets an opportunity to waste time or perform personal businesses during work time.
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Increase in the workers supervision and implementation of disciplinary measures for those who tend to misuse the organization resources should be implemented. Defining conflict resolution strategies and ensuring minimal chances of conflict development will also ease the management role and hence reduce or eliminate the manager’s stress. The manager should also try to promote a favorable work environment that will motivate workers to carry out their responsibilities without follow up and accomplish more than they are anticipated to accomplish. This will ease the management demand and stress (Michie, 2002).
Policies and Procedures to enhance Team Success
The manager should develop policies and procedures on how to resolve conflict among workers. This will ensure that conflicts do not propagate beyond the required level and that they are not fueled to influence the general organization performance. Other policies will be created to guide on the use of organization resources which include working time and the garget provided to accomplish the organization duties. Disciplinary action to be employed when one goes against the defined policy will clearly be stated.
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