We Address Workplace Behavior and Relationships Impacting Business Risks

In response to a formal allegation or complaint, many employers feel compelled to conduct a workplace investigation. The purpose of an investigation is fact-finding in order to apportion blame: “who did what, and what should we do in response?”
But sometimes those are unhelpful questions to ask. In the ProActive ReSolutions Conference, we ask:

• What happened?
• How has it affected people?
• What can be done to fix any hurt and harm?
• What can we learn from it so we take something positive out of the conflict?

Rather than imposing a solution on the group that could exacerbate the conflict, it is preferable to engage in a process that allows the group of affected people to come together, confront their difficulties and develop a plan to reconcile their differences.

ProActive Conferencing is a process for transforming conflict into cooperation within groups. In a ProActive Conference, the community of people affected by conflict comes together and engages in a facilitated exchange about what has happened, and how people have been affected.

Participants benefit from the opportunity to say things to each other that they have either avoided saying or have said hurtfully rather than helpfully. The group then decides together what needs to be done in order to behave constructively towards to each other.

In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the need to pay attention to how we each make sense of workplace experiences to ourselves and to each other. Most workplaces have a policy that says, if another person’s behavior feels disrespectful, you need to speak to that person yourself, in the first instance, and let them know that what they’ve said or done has upset you.  Our experience strongly suggests that this is one of the most breached policies in every workplace.  The reason most of us most of the time breach that policy, is that many of our workplaces are not psychologically safe environments.

A psychologically safe workplace is a workplace where everyone is encouraged and rewarded for speaking up, where you feel OK saying that you don’t understand what’s being talked about or discussed, where mistakes are used as opportunities to learn, where different points of view are available, expressed and heard, and where your leaders model this behavior themselves. In a psychologically safe workplace, while it might feel a little uncomfortable to give a colleague some negative feedback, it’s both expected and accepted, and not only does it not threaten the system of relationships, it in fact serves to strengthen your relationships.

There is much written about building and maintaining a psychologically safe workplace and we recommend you access work done by Professor Amy Edmondson at Harvard, by McKinsey & Company plus others, and by Google in their Project Aristotle literature.

Different jurisdictions have legislation requiring organizations to minimize psycho-social hazards and ensure their employees have a psychologically safe workplace.

For example, Safe Work Australia defines a psychosocial hazard as “anything that could cause psychological harm (e.g. harm someone’s mental health)”. It goes on to provide examples of common psychosocial hazards at work, including:

• job demands
• low job control
• poor support
• lack of role clarity
• poor organizational change management
• inadequate reward and recognition
• poor organizational justice
• traumatic events or material
• remote or isolated work
• poor physical environment
• violence and aggression
• bullying
• harassment, including sexual and gender-based harassment, and
• conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions