Using Analytics for Conflict Management

Remember in second grade when your two best friends got in a fight and you had to help solve it?

Remember last week when your manager had to go to the marketing team manager and tell him/her that one of the recent campaign ideas they created was just not going to work?

Conflict Management is something most of us have been doing in some form since we were Kindergarteners on the playground (although, probably not well).  While conflict is never comfortable, it’s especially uncomfortable when it happens in the workplace. However, it happens all the time, whether it’s employee/employee conflict, manager/employee conflict, or cross-functional team conflict. 

Of course, there are many ways you can improve your conflict management skills—training, conferences, etc. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do all those things, but people intelligence can help you manage conflict too. 

I know you are asking, “In what situations would data ever help me with conflict management”? 

Scenario One: You Don’t Have Conflict Because You Already Prevented It. 

Okay, I know I’m not answering the question here quite yet, but hear me out. With people intelligence software, you can predict problems before they even start. How so? If you have a near real-time stream of all of the data your teams are generating, aggregated and analyzed in a way that makes sense to anyone. Say that you hear a whisper in the kitchen that your top sales rep, Maggie, is shopping for a job elsewhere. 

Well, if you had been using a people intelligence software, you would’ve seen that Maggie essentially stopped interacting on Slack a long time ago. While she seemed to be chugging away logging tasks, calls, and emails into your  CRM database, the quality of her notes had declined, her external emails became short, and she was missing scheduled calls frequently.  If you were using people intelligence software, you would have seen this trend and would have made an extra effort to find out and alleviate the challenges Maggie was facing.

Now Maggie is gone, everyone on the sales team is mad, rumors are afloat, and as the sales team manager, your boss isn’t thrilled that you didn’t see this one coming. Boom, conflict created. 

Scenario Two: You Hired a Great New Manager, But You Aren’t Getting Great Reviews From Some of The Team. 

You hired Jo to be the new leader of the software team, as she had glowing reviews from her previous company and impressed you during the interview process. However, it turns out Jo is used to managing a group of people that are all high in openness, meaning that they are usually quick to jump on new ideas and listen to new viewpoints, while the current software team is more of a mix of both high and low. The low in openness employees are feeling uncomfortable with Jo, and Jo isn’t quite sure why they are reacting this way. Now, suppose you were using a people intelligence platform. In this case, the story might be a little different—Jo would have personality insights generated from her employee’s everyday data and would be able to look into how to be a better manager for them, managing to their preferences and helping everyone in return.

Scenario Three: You And Your Co-Worker Have A Big Decision to Make, And Can’t Agree On How To Make It. 

Growth in your company has stalled, and you and your fellow C-Suite colleague, Christina, have been tasked with figuring out what to do and why. You think it’s a result of how the sales team has been conducting business—over promising and under delivering. Christina believes it’s a result of the product & engineering teams not pushing out code fast enough—they keep missing their deadlines. Both of you have some data (that you don’t really know how to get anything out of), but mainly you are making this decision on some anecdotes you heard around the office. Stop fighting with Christina about what to do, stop relying on gut feelings, and leverage people intelligence. With a people intelligence platform, you can get real-time data and automated prescriptive guidance, along with high-level overviews and deep insights around your teams, right in front of you, in an easy to read way. Now you know where growth stalled (turns out Christina was right and there are a ton of bottlenecks affecting your product & engineering team’s efficiency).

Scenario Four: Innovation on  the Engineering Team Has Become Stagnant Because Your Employees Don’t Have The Right Skills. 

When you are a growing business, you need to quickly hire people who can bring new skills to the table. You might have a fantastic engineering team that does excellent work with Python and are a lovely culture fit, but you need employees with a little more experience in Java. You’re asking the broader engineering team to piece together lines of Java using resources like StackOverflow, which leads to burnout and frustration as they try to manage both the deadlines around your new development projects and their routine tasks. The frustration has overcome your employees, and they are starting to get noticeably stressed out. If you had a people intelligence platform, you could’ve seen this coming—you would be able to automate a strength-based culture to know where you currently have skills and where skills are lacking (shown below).

Scenario Five: Employees Are Burning Out—Fast. 

Think about how you feel when you are burnt out—probably not great. Imagine how it would feel if you were burnt out, and someone comes to you with a problem, or a customer doesn’t have the greatest interaction with you and the team. Your Customer service and support teams work hard to make sure that your clients are happy, which has a massive impact on the business. The last thing you want is for them to be unhappy. With a people intelligence platform, you can get automated guidance, insights, and recommendations on preventing burnout and ensuring a healthy work-life balance. If you see that one of your customer service employees, Derek, has been working long hours, Peoplelogic could give you, the manager, a heads up, and you could go to Derek and offer him a day off or make sure his workload is sustainable. 

Essentially, nobody likes conflict. But a lot of workplace conflict could become entirely preventable using a people intelligence platform like Peoplelogic. Peoplelogic.ai is mission control for teams, watching customer retention, employee satisfaction, and workflows within your company 24/7/365. We mitigate risks and surface opportunities for growth in real-time, so you can focus on scaling your business and staying true to your company culture. And guess what? You can get started for free.