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Employee disputes: how to deal with them and prevent more

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This guide outlines the strategies you can use to deal with employee disputes, and methods to prevent further disputes happening.

In order to have the most productive and the happiest workplace, you need to make sure that you are doing what you can to keep in good favour with the employees you hire. It can be all too easy, when you work in such close quarters day after day, to get on each other’s nerves or otherwise have trouble with each other in employee disputes, but you do need to try and find a way to avoid this as best as you can.

How to prevent and deal with employee disputes

While it is not always easy to prevent employee disputes, it is something that you should generally be able to do as long as you focus on it in the right way. In this article, we are going to look at some of the things that you might want to take on board in order to avoid employee disputes. This will lead to a much more conducive way of working with people, and it will mean that you are going to be able to lead your team with much more power and grace.

Hire people you get along with

When you hire people, what are you looking for? Most of all, of course, you are looking for people who have the necessary skills and relevant experience to be able to lead your business to the success you are looking for. You also want someone who is passionate about what you are doing. But the truth is that you also want to hire someone who you know you are going to get along with pretty well.

That doesn’t mean restricting your recruitment to specific kinds of personalities; you should keep that wide open and make sure you don’t discriminate. But it does mean that you probably want to make sure that the people you hire are going to be easy to work with, and that means testing the waters during the interview stage to ensure that you are the kind of people who can get along.

As long as you are, that will make it much less likely that you are ever going to have any real employee disputes which turn into something huge, and that is a great position to be in to start off with.

Quantify rather than qualify

Often, the kinds of employee disputes that crop up in workplaces are to do with a lack of agreement between two people over what has been done and what hasn’t been done. Let’s say that you are convinced that an employee has not worked the hours that they should, or that they have clocked out for lunch early.

This is a common argument in offices up and down the country, but the truth is that you can easily get on top of it by simply having a way to quantify worked hours. Rather than talking it out and trusting what people say, you might want to think about using a timing software so that there is no way you can possibly dispute it. Visit Deputy AU to try their timesheet app if you want to see an example of the kind of technology available for this kind of purpose.

As long as you are quantifying the problem in this way, there will be no room for employee disputes about it – meaning that you and your employees can continue to get on in a way which is most conducive to the work being done.

Have complaints processes for employee disputes

No matter what you do, there is always the chance that someone is going to want to complain about something. It is well within their rights to do so if they feel that you or the business generally has treated them improperly, so you do need to make sure that you allow space for such complaints.

From the moment you hire a single employee, you must have a complaints procedure in place for employee disputes, and you should be clear on what it is. The irony is that just having a complaints procedure will do wonders for the atmosphere in the office, and it will mean that people are generally happier working for you – therefore resulting in fewer complaints.

It’s when you keep the idea of complaining in the dark that people start to feel put-upon, so this is an important lesson to learn early on. Be clear about complaints, and you will find that you have fewer employee disputes.

The fewer employee disputes you have in your workplace, the more that you can just carry on as you are, doing the work that you need to do. That is absolutely the way to approach this.

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