Proactive Employee Relations Turning Conflict Into Insight

(0:00 – 9:48)

All right, but it looks like we’ve got some folks here. Oh, super. Let’s get started.

Thanks everyone for tuning in. Just had a couple of good sessions talking to Tonya Jackson, CHRO, then talking to our friend Elizabeth Bohannon, former outside counsel, in-house counsel, turned executive coach on how to turn a risk into really a culture leader, and I’ve seen her do it time and time again, and now we have the pleasure and opportunity to talk to Allison Colgin, similar to myself, frankly, and Elizabeth Bohannon, another employment lawyer for you, and similar to Elizabeth, outside counsel, in-house counsel, you know, variety of different positions, so she’s seen these issues from all sides. She is currently, and has been for a while, Emtrain’s Ask the Expert lawyer, so for those of you who are part of the Emtrain’s community and your learners ask questions, Allison is the person who is answering those questions with as much wisdom and guidance as she can, and she’s also, you know, still continues to practice law at VLP Law Group, so Allison, thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate it. So we’re going to spend the next 20 minutes or so just talking about employee relations and, you know, how we can get, you know, ahead of the issues, ahead of the conflicts, to start to be more proactive and lean into solving problems rather than just cleaning up problems. So just to set the table and put it in chat, folks would be interested in how many folks tuning in today are part of employee relations, and if you are, you certainly know that a lot of the work is, like, after the conflict is boiled over and the emotions are running really high, you’re asked to come in and clean up, basically, and that gets to be a little tiresome, and I think especially with AI and especially with data, I do think that we have an opportunity ahead of us to, you know, situate ourselves so that we’re more proactive, and with that is kind of our context for the conversation, Allison.

You know, what do you see as some of the kind of workflows that folks can use to put themselves from reactive to proactive? Yeah, well, it’s really critical that companies and HR teams pay attention to the types of situations and behaviors that are causing the ER issues in the first place in their organization, and so look to, like, are the complaints mostly centered around one department or manager, or what are the core behaviors at issue? So, for example, you might have, like, managers who are perceived as bullies. There are guaranteed to be complaints around managers who maybe have a rough style, let’s say. Sometimes, you know, it’s bias complaints that comes up because of performance reviews or promotion decisions, comp adjustments, that kind of thing, particularly where communication hasn’t been very good, and then people are blindsided, right? And there’s personality conflicts, and it may be just between team members, not necessarily managers, but sometimes a few personality conflicts can affect morale for the entire team, and then there’s the classic situation where a manager, like, a manager is either making inappropriate comments or jokes or maybe ignoring or encouraging individual contributors to do so, just totally clueless about the impact that such comments are having on the team, the larger organization morale.

So, I would love to hear from the folks tuning in, and just put it in the chat just to make it easier, how many of you have your finger on the pulse of the, let’s say, four or five behaviors that kind of generate 80%, you know, of your conflicts? Like, that would be interesting to know, you know, if people are able to kind of say, all right, we’re always going to have bullying issues, we’re always going to have, you know, complaints stemming, bias complaints stemming from performance management, season, you know, so just getting that, all right, that’s super. So, on that, just to double tap a little bit, Allison, you know, so let’s just say, all right, our employee relations community has a good handle on, and here’s the four or five situations that seem to happen. Suggestions on, like, how they map it to basically, you know, which teams, which leaders are generating that? Right, I mean, that’s when you focus on where are these conflicts happening, where they’re coming up, and you’re definitely going to have some teams, managers, where they’re having lots of conflict and others that aren’t having any, and if you focus on those areas where the conflicts are rising, then you’ll have an opportunity to develop and coach and change behavior before it becomes a full-blown lawsuit or administrative claim or something like that.

So, I think, you know, it’s pretty well settled how you kind of look at kind of the lagging indicators, like what’s happened, what can we learn from all the complaints and where they are happening in the organization? What thoughts, what guidance do you have on how do you look at predictive information just to guess at what’s brewing right underneath the surface? Right. Well, you can look to Emtrain’s cultural skills and the indicators that you can get from Emtrain or from the employees taking the course, and these are skills such as managing bias, managing power, connecting in groups and out groups, and from there, you can determine whether there are managers that have some lower skill levels, and my guess is that where you see those managers with lower skill levels, you’ll see more conflict and friction, and where there’s more conflict and friction, you’ll eventually see more employee complaints. So, these situations, since they arise out of a lack of managerial skills, you have this opportunity to intervene before legal complaints are initiated, and you can help develop and strengthen managerial skills, interpersonal skills of managers and employees so that you can reduce this conflict and friction in the organization, and I’ll just say that, you know, as an employment litigator, I have rarely seen cases where it’s that evolve out of like just a bad person, right? Generally, what I see are decent people who happen to be managers who either ignore situations because they’re too overwhelmed or they are overly reactive to situations and may not have the discipline or interpersonal skills to show up in a way that handles the situation, reduces friction, and makes employees feel heard.

(9:49 – 11:03)

Yeah, so I want to kind of riff on that a little bit because I hope this is kind of well settled with this group tuning in today, but if not, just to make sure, the vast majority of conflicts don’t involve, you know, a bad egg. It, you know, certainly, you know, once in a while, you’ll have a bad egg. Most are just decent people with, you know, I’ll call it under, either underdeveloped soft skills, you know, interpersonal skills, or they’re under extreme stress or they’re reactive to the situation at a moment, and as you said, Allison, they’re needing some discipline, and this is kind of an extension of what, you know, Elizabeth and Lorraine were talking about in our last, you know, session of, you know, having a leader not understanding or not thinking through how that leader’s actions and comments are getting kind of perceived, you know, by the people in the organization, and there’s usually a disconnect, so leaning in as an employee relations leader, leaning into, hey, these are just a set of skills.

(11:04 – 11:22)

This is not knowledge. This is not a good person versus bad person. These are just a set of skills that, you know, all of us have an opportunity to be more thoughtful about and lean into so that we don’t get the bad kind of interpersonal outcomes that we may be experiencing.

(11:23 – 13:54)

Right. I mean, most employment claims are preventable, right? If the ER team can get there in time, can coach and develop, and that’s not to say they’re all preventable. There are always going to be difficult employees who create trouble, and they’re going to make claims no matter what.

They can’t face their own, you know, their own, sorry, my, but they can’t face it. They are the problem, right? Sometimes you’re going to have employees who just aren’t good performers or are just create so much conflict, and they’re just difficult people, right? And but well-trained managers help those claims that could be made by those employees not viable, make it easier to transition those employees out of the organization so they’re not creating other claims and other problems, right? So, so yes, employment claims are preventable for the most part, and, and, and paying attention and getting that training makes a huge difference to an organization, and so look for those patterns and coach and develop those skills and learn and take what you’ve learned from the intelligence that Emtrain’s providing you, and, and you’ll get a much better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of your culture skills per your business unit. For the manager.

So just quickly, folks, you know, please take a look at Emtrain’s framework of culture skills. If that doesn’t, you know, quite resonate with you, you know, obviously, think of your own derivative of that, but you know, the idea of thinking about these as skills as opposed to understanding policies and good people versus bad people, I just don’t think that that’s, you know, designed to get us to good outcomes. We have about 10 minutes left, Allison, and it’s always fun to hear about the ask the expert questions.

I think it’s, this is synergistic with, you know, getting ahead of issues and understanding what’s causing people, you know, a little bit more angst and some thought. So you and I had talked about one in particular that I’ve been sharing with clients because I think it’s just so, so nail on the head what’s going on today. You want to share a couple ask the expert questions that seem to be getting a whole lot of people engaged.

(13:55 – 16:07)

Sure. Sure. Well, I’ll start with the one I think you’re talking about, which is there’s a video in PWH 13 that it depicts a manager meeting with her team, which is two employees, and talking about how we have this huge deadline.

We’ve been talking about it’s tomorrow. So just be prepared to stay late tonight till we get this done. And one of the employees says, I can’t stay tonight.

I have, I have rehearsal every night at five. I told you that. And the manager’s shocked, right? She’s like, wait, yes, I have been letting you leave at five every day.

But I told you that tonight, we had a deadline and you’re gonna have, you’re gonna have to stay. And conflict arises, and it ends with the employee storming out, and, and accusing the manager of not respecting her work life balance. So, and, and it’s funny, because I looked at this.

And my reaction is, yeah, because of course, in my generation, you know, I mean, working at a law firm, I mean, I might not go home one night, you know, working. So it was like, I was actually pretty shocked how many comments that I get about how out of line the manager was, and do not understand the course’s description of the employee behavior is yellow, because instead of, you know, because she just kind of yelled and stormed off, right? Like she didn’t handle it in a way. But that’s not the perception of a lot of the employees that are watching this.

And so I would say it’s split, I couldn’t tell you it’s 5050. I think most people who write to ask the expert, it’s to complain about what the answer was, right? So I get more questions, I get more comments from people who don’t understand why the manager wasn’t involved. But there’s definitely a generational difference.

(16:07 – 16:47)

Well, I’ll just say when you shared that with me, I did a little survey within the Emtrain workforce, which is multi generational, right? And it certainly seemed that depending on which generation you represented, you either thought the younger worker was totally right on the money, and like, what she did was excellent. Or conversely, you thought the middle age manager was totally right on the money, like it was definitely polarized. Which I want to just loop back to, you know, our conversation about this is not good people or bad people.

(16:48 – 25:42)

As an employment lawyer myself, who’s written, like, hundreds of workplace policies, your policies are not designed to educate. I’ll just that’s a provocative statement. I know that but they’re not.

They’re not designed to upskill. They’re not designed to bring clarity. They’re designed to defend the business when that occurs, right? So in addition to your policies, you really need to think about how are you going to upskill people.

We all have very different perspectives of what good looks like. And this gets into the employee relations issues. We’re all optimizing for different things, right? Let’s just take your classic performance management scenario where the manager is optimizing to get their output generated.

And the employee in direct report is optimizing for their career growth and their salary increase, right? So that’s automatically, you know, puts people, you know, potentially at odds. So just this notion of we all have these differences to begin with, you know, and skill at navigating these differences is where we kind of bring some cohesion and reduce conflict. Any other fun kind of polarizing response to a scene, Allison? I would say that some of the more controversial or have been around, I would say the underlying theme is that people are feeling uncomfortable in their workplace because their religious views or political views don’t deviate from the majority.

And so, and this also goes to, so they’re feeling alienated. And when they feel like maybe they’re being told they have to use certain pronouns or whatever, they’re or they feel like other people are allowed to have conversations about politics or something, but they can’t because if they said anything, they’d be ridiculed. And so that, some of the more emotional questions or comments I get have been around that.

And this also ties in with this confusion about the first amendment and this idea that employees have that I can say whatever I want because my first amendment rights, and it takes some, you know, I often have to explain to employees that there is no first amendment right, you know, vis-a-vis your private employer, that the employer not only has the rights, but the obligation to restrain certain kinds of speech. So particularly to protect other employees from harassment, right, from being harassed, right? If you had a total first amendment right, you could never be fired for anything you said in the workplace, you can imagine all the harassment claims that would also be developing from the workplace. So employees, you know, it’s educating employees that they need to understand that an employer has the right and can insist that an employee’s speech is consistent with the mission values of the employer.

And so that is another area that comes up a lot. And, but it is something to keep in mind that this alienation that some employees are feeling can ultimately lead to conflict and to claims. And to be thoughtful about what kind of conversations are happening in the workplace that maybe just aren’t appropriate for the workplace, even if they’re not harassment per se, like political discussions, or can create a lot of conflict that is unnecessary, right? Well, that’s a good preview to the conversation that will happen right after us, Allison, on a preview of our 2026 culture report, where the number one finding, so 46 million employee sentiment responses, and the number one finding is polarization within the organization.

So totally consistent with what you’re experiencing just through the ask the expert mechanism. You know, and so as we think about what we can do as HR leaders and people leaders, being super thoughtful, and this is where I love Lisa’s comment here in the chat, you know, empathy is a powerful skill, and it is, it’s something that you can teach yourself and lean into, just think about, hey, how is this other person thinking? How are they perceiving, you know, the team dynamics around them to allow people to feel more comfortable? Because with comfort, you know, psychological comfort comes the ability to have, you know, more trust, and with more trust, you can start to have more difficult conversations, you know, where you unpack some conflicts. Yes, and I will say the final, I just want to say one final type of question I get a lot is how people want to understand how to use the workplace color spectrum and call out harassment, and it is, and it’s such a great tool for employees, and I talk about, well, this is your ability, like, you want to know how to call out of harassment, that’s why there’s the workplace color spectrum, so that you, we can all use a common language, but without being aggressive or insulting to someone, but just saying, hey, that was yellow, it made me feel better.

That was orange, that’s teetering on, you know, like, dangerous ground, you might want to reconsider, but in a way that’s not. Yeah, not demonizing. I was just talking yesterday to a global leader of employee relations at a really large organization, global organization, and she said, I think, what you and I experience, like, very, very few claims actually meet the technical legal definition of harassment or discrimination, certainly some do, but the vast majority do not, and not to say that there aren’t problems.

Obviously, if someone’s making a claim, there’s problems, but giving a shared language so that people have the tools and are enabled to deescalate those conflicts themselves is super helpful, just to start, you know, kind of diffuse conflict before it gets into a big brouhaha. Right, yes. So, probably we have a minute left to take a question.

I saw one here earlier. How do we support HR managers’ inability to handle conflict? So, HR leaders, in particular, I think, have to, Jessica, be skilled at handling conflict, and that’s, if you have people, you’ll have conflict. I mean, just, you know, people equals conflict.

I mean, it’s just, that’s the human condition. So, you know, I always say clarity is kindness, but we have a conflict resolution course. There are many, so that’s, you know, that’s part of our library, but there are many, many courses and activities to engage in that will fine-tune your ability, a person’s ability to dissect and try to solve the different components of a conflict, but without that, you’re just going to have more and more, I think, issues.

Allison, other thoughts? Oh, yeah. I mean, an HR person is at the center of conflict a lot of times. It’s a really important skill, but it is a skill that can be learned, you know.

I mean, some of it is learning just steps to take, and then some of it is learning to, like, bring the emotions down. You’re, you know, so if someone really has a problem with conflict, that will create all sorts of heart rate and, you know, and so learning how to control one’s anxiety and also the skills to address the conflict. Those are two areas that I would look to for that, for that HR person.

(25:42 – 26:11)

Allison, so great to have you, and it’s always fun to hear about the Ask the Expert questions, and as well, pattern matching to be more proactive rather than reactive. Thank you so much, everyone. We’re going to go into the next session, which is the preview of our 2026 culture report, which I think is going to be helpful for everyone here, and the top issues that are creating dynamics in the workplace.

So, Allison, again, thank you so much. Thank you so much. This is great.

Bye-bye.