How Stress and Conflict Can Be Bad for Your Business

Happy workers make for the best, most productive and efficient workers. Alternatively, stressed and agitated workers are toxic to workplace productivity with stress effecting problem solving skills, critical and creative thinking, memory, and communication. Being stressed for a long period of time can even disturb sleep, cause depression, and affect your immune system, causing workers to get sick more often.

Stress that workers feel on a day to day basis often comes from the workplace environment, and more specifically, unhealthy work relationships and unresolved colleague conflicts. Many employers don’t realize that unhealthy workplace relationships, unhappy employees, and conflict avoidance can actually be very detrimental to a company’s bottom line.

Unfortunately many employees are afraid to speak up about their concern and to ask for assistance to work towards resolution, thus choosing instead to completely avoid any issues. According to a study conducted by the authors of the New York Times bestselling book Crucial Conversations, 95 percent of a company’s workforce struggles to speak up to their colleagues about workplace concerns. Employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid and 8 percent of employees estimate their avoidance costs their organization more than $10,000. In addition, the stress caused by unresolved conflict can result in loss of profit due to additional sick time, and lack of efficiency.

To remedy these problems, employees and employers can reach out to accredited workplace mediators to resolve conflicts, disputes, and disagreements in a prompt, discreet, efficient and cost-effective manner. Don’t wait for the issues to resolve themselves. Chances are more money and productivity will be wasted and the conflicts may end up getting worse.

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About the Author:

PCCS (also known as Peel Counselling & Consulting Services) began in 1992 as a private practice of Debra Rodrigues. Over the years it has grown well beyond Peel region into Peel, Halton, Dufferin, and the GTA. In fact, Ms. Rodrigues receives calls from persons around the world to conduct mediation.

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