For any emerging wirehouse, financial advisement company or brokerage, your employees are among your best assets. They can, however, also become a huge liability if your employer-employee relationship sours.
Understanding how to minimize the potential for serious conflicts is key to your company’s future.
Clear contracts protect both employer and employee
Contracts are multi-use tools that can help define job duties, expectations about compensation, confidentiality agreements and more. Having a signed agreement in place is always critical with your important employees and contractors.
They can also be used to outline how your company’s conflict resolution process works. It’s inevitable that conflicts will happen in the workplace. Those conflicts shouldn’t ever impact the clients who have entrusted your company with their financial matters, however, and your policies can help ensure that remains true.
Conflict resolution policies need to be clearly defined
Conflict resolution can be a touchy subject in the workplace. It needs to be crystal clear that a structure exists to address whatever conflict is happening, and that grievances from “within” should never make it to a client’s ear. In addition, your policies need to stress the idea that civility is always expected between your employees — even when there are disputes.
The conflict resolution method that you use might include using a neutral third party to help mediate the matter. For some employees, this might be a trained supervisor. For executives, using a mediator from outside of the company might be beneficial.
Working with an attorney can help you to set the guidelines and protocols that will define your company’s culture, meet the goals you have, and protect your future from unnecessary litigation. Employment matters can be some of the most complicated aspects of your business, so a proactive approach with guidance is usually wise.