Conflict Resolution
I was leaving for the day and was talking to my mom on my cell phone while getting on the elevator and my coworker overheard part of a conversation and sent an email to my director and manager that she overheard me talking on the phone and that the other campus was questioning my overtime. The conversation was between my mother and I and the question was how long we were going to be allowed overtime (she works at Daytona Beach so we were comparing how long we would be able to use overtime to catch up on our work). My statement to her was that I wasn’t sure how long we would be able to use overtime but that hopefully it wasn’t cut short.
The next day when I got to work I see this email that my director forwarded to me from my coworker because he wanted to let me know what she had sent to him. The email stated that she had overheard me saying that someone was questioning my overtime and that she was concerned because a coworker had been fired when I first started working at worldwide because this coworker had lied about overtime that she claimed she worked. My coworker said she didn’t want to see this happen again. I was very angry and upset when I read this email because of the way it was written it sounded as though I was not really working the overtime and included days I had taken off of work and how I needed to be turning in my PL, etc. I actually went to her office to confront her and thankfully she was not there because I feel that I may not have been able to be calm in that situation.
My director and manager were sent the email and she ended up calling HR because she found out that the director had forwarded me the email she had sent out to them. We each had to meet with HR and tell our side of the story. HR asked me directly if I knew why I was there. I said frankly I had no idea and wasn’t sure how it got to this point and they said they didn’t know why either. My director never attended any of the meetings at all. I found it odd that he was the reason this escalated and he didn’t even bother to be there. My manager was there for each meeting and acted as the mediator.
After the meetings were over HR asked me if I felt that I could continue to work without any further issues with my coworker. I said that I would be fine and HR left it at that. My manager waited a week and then took us both to lunch and had us talk it out. I was still upset with the way she had handled the situation and asked that if she ever overheard something that she should come directly to me to get it cleared up. She apologized for what had happened and said that she would come to me first next time. She said she called HR more because of how our director had handled the situation and not because of me.
There were many ways to handle this issue that would not have involved it being escalated to the point it was. First of all my director (he is no longer working at ERAU) should have never sent me that email. He should have spoken to her first and then called me in after to get to the bottom of the issue and what she thought she overheard. I understand that he felt that I should see it but at the same time it was breaking the trust she had in him by forwarding that message to me. I was told later that neither my director nor my manager even took her email with a grain of salt because it had happened before so they were just ignoring it. I tried finding the director but he wasn’t around so I went to my manager who told me to just disregard it as no one was questioning overtime and there was no issue.
I should have taken this advice and left it alone and it may have blown over in time. Going to her office at the end of day was not a smart move because I realized I still had some anger toward the whole thing so I didn’t handle it as well as I could have. I f I had to do this all over again I would have gone directly to my director and asked him about the issue and told him what my conversation was about. I may have even asked to work from home for the day until the situation blew over. I definitely would have asked that she was spoken to about how she handled the whole thing. I learned a valuable lesson from this and that is that you can’t let your emotions overtake you and that you need to hear both sides of the story and try to come to an understanding in this case sitting us down together to discuss the problem and working on a solution together.
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