Fostering peace at work

About this trend

There is a huge amount of conflict in the world currently. Political conflict and upheaval (including wars and displaced communities), economic conflict and environmental conflict being the most obvious examples. People’s different views, understanding and experiences of conflict can easily spill over into the workplace, causing conflict in work too.

Employers have a responsibility to promote and foster harmonious relationships at work. It’s also in their best interests because conflict at work can have a very negative impact on culture, productivity, morale, engagement, performance and reputation, not to mention recruitment and retention.

It needs to start at the top. It is important that leaders create a culture that encourages peaceful relations at work. They need to set clear behaviour expectations and have policies and frameworks in place for managing conflict. They also need to role model the right behaviour, demonstrating the importance of inclusivity, diversity, respect and tolerance for other people, their perspectives and beliefs. It’s about ensuring people have a shared, working understanding of the culture and values of the organisation and different ethics and beliefs.

The words ‘empathy, compassion and respect’ feature several times in the Innovating Pedagogy section on peace and these words are highly relevant in the workplace too.

Learning teams have an important role to play in terms of raising awareness – among leaders, managers and the general workforce. L&D is well placed to lead on this, ensuring that the right learning interventions, resources and guidance are available to help resolve conflict in the workplace and reduce the likelihood of it escalating.

Fostering peace at work involves bringing people together, enabling different perspectives and experiences to be voiced and heard. L&D can take a facilitative role, enabling healthy dialogue between individuals and across the workforce.

An area where learning professionals can potentially have the most impact is management. Managers are absolutely critical to positive workplace relations, but many become managers on account of their technical expertise, rather than their ability to manage people. And many aren’t given the training they need to be effective managers, when they need it. If L&D can redress that and ensure managers are equipped with the skills and behaviours they need, it will reduce the probability of conflict arising. And when conflict does occur, managers should be able to draw on their learning – around conflict resolution, positive communications, diversity, etc – to resolve any issues.

The expert view

Rachel Suff, Senior Policy Adviser, Employee Relations and Wellbeing, at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

Conflict is inherent in the workplace. It will happen so organisations need to be aware of it, what it looks like and how they can deal with it. They need to be proactive. If you don’t have strategies and ways of managing conflict, then people will probably be more affected when it does happen.

There are many different expressions of conflict. Some of the situations in the world currently, abroad and closer to home, are very tricky in terms of people’s emotions. We’ve got political turmoil - a lot of people feel very deeply about the dreadful scenes we’ve seen in the Middle East, for instance. People really care about issues going on in the world, such as climate change and politics, and what happens outside the workplace doesn’t always stay outside the workplace.

Employers need to get the balance right – we want workplaces to be spaces where people feel it’s safe to talk about issues, but there have to be parameters, so that people don’t offend or upset others. It’s about psychological safety.

There is a level of complexity around managing conflict and developing inclusive cultures that don’t just tolerate difference, but celebrate difference. Managers are so important here because they have the day-to-day contact with people, they’ve got the relationships. They have to build trust-based relationships.

Managers need to have the capabilities and the confidence to manage conflict. Training and ongoing guidance is really important, but often managers are thrown in at the deep end and don’t have training in how to manage people. They could be facing some very complex situations in their teams and they need to have the training, confidence and knowledge to understand when situations are tipping over and what they can do in a preventative way.

They need to have the grounding, the skills and behaviours to deal with difficult situations. Skills such as conflict management and good communication. You have to train managers on how to act, listen, defuse situations, mediate, facilitate and resolve conflict and have those difficult, sensitive conversations with people.

You will need extra resources and guidance to deal with specific, complicated situations, but first of all, you need that good people management training. And you need leaders and leadership that are reinforcing those behaviours.

Relationship building is very important, as is giving people opportunities to come together and engage in healthy discussion. It’s about tolerance and empathy and global citizenship.

Professor Agnes Kukulska-Hulme
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University

Resources:

• UNESCO’s Recommendation on Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development, was adopted by UNESCO’s 194 Member States in November 2023: https://www.unesco.org/en/globalcitizenship-peace-education/recommendation
• The CIPD Good Work Index 2023 https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/2023-pdfs/2023-good-work-index-report-8407.pdf
• Towards a Decolonial Praxis in Critical Peace Education: Postcolonial Insights and Pedagogic Possibilities: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11217-020-09707-y