Sometimes, personalities clash so much at work that specialist 'feud-breakers' are called in to defuse the situation.
“People say to me, ‘She’s dishonest, She’s scheming, He’s feathering his own nest, He’s a chauvinist’. They swear,” says Felicity Steadman, a UK-based mediator who has been untangling messy workplace wars for more than 26 years.
“They’re often very apologetic. They say, ‘I’m sorry I don’t know what’s happened to me, I’m not this kind of person, I don’t usually behave like this’.”
This is a white-collar warzone where the weapons are insults, tears and aggrieved silence. The combatants are colleagues who can’t stand each other. Hostilities escalate and the damage amounts to billions of dollars in absenteeism, sick leave, litigation and decreased productivity.
Workplace conflict was estimated to cost companies $359 billion a year in the US alone in 2008, according to global research by human resources specialist CPP, Inc. This was based on American employees spending an average of 2.8 hours a week in dealing with conflict. In Germany and Ireland the average weekly time was even higher – 3.3 hours. Which is why, increasingly, companies call in professional mediators.
[…]
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171116-the-people-sent-in-to-fix-toxic-office-relationships