NEHRA's Emerging HR Professionals: Organizational Conflict Resolution - HR’s Tightrope

Human Resource personnel wear a multitude of hats involving recruitment, workplace safety, employee relations, compensation administration and planning, labor law compliance and training. Imbued throughout, and perhaps most resource demanding, is workplace conflict management: where HR walks the tightrope between safeguarding the workplace, as well as the employer, while ensuring employees have a legally compliant, safe work environment that does not interfere with their ability to carry out their duties.

This presentation will cover principles and practices in performing the function of organizational conflict management. It will, as well, confront the tightrope HR walks in providing such function: balancing disputants' concerns and needs, addressing confidentiality and its bounds, recognizing conflicts of interest, and realizing when the function of conflict resolution may lie outside the office’s role. The presentation will also address areas in which HR is particularly challenged by misconceptions over its purpose, employee expectations, and the office's own limitations, and offer clarity and insight to engender confidence in handling or directing matters so as to achieve apt resolution.