In the UK, employers do not have a specific legal obligation to provide conflict management training as a standalone, mandated course for all staff, or for every situation.
However, they do have a general legal duty of care to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their employees. This duty is primarily laid out in the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and associated regulations.
Here is how that translates to conflict and training:
- Risk Assessment: Employers are legally required to conduct risk assessments to identify potential hazards in the workplace, including risks from violence and aggression.
- If the risk assessment identifies that employees are likely to encounter conflict, aggression, or violence as part of their job (e.g., in customer-facing roles, healthcare, retail, public services), then the employer has a duty to take reasonable steps to control those risks.
- Controlling Risks: Providing training is often considered a “reasonable step” to control the risks associated with conflict. This means that while conflict resolution training is not universally mandated, it becomes a legal necessity where there is an identified risk of conflict or violence.
- Types of Training: Where required, the training should equip staff to:
- Recognise the early signs of aggression.
- De-escalate potentially violent situations.
- Communicate effectively in tense situations.
- Understand how to protect their personal safety.
- Know when and how to seek assistance.
- Understand the legal aspects of “reasonable force” if applicable to their role.
- ACAS Code of Practice:
- While not strictly law, the Acas Code of Practice on Disciplinary and Grievance Procedures sets out minimum standards for employers to follow in handling workplace disputes. Following this code can help prevent conflicts from escalating and is often considered in employment tribunal cases.
- Specific Sectors: In certain sectors, like healthcare (e.g., NHS staff), conflict resolution training is often considered statutory and mandatory due to the high likelihood of encountering aggression and violence.
- In summary:
- There is no blanket legal mandate for all staff.
- Legal obligation arises from health and safety duties. If your risk assessment shows a risk of conflict/violence, you must provide training to mitigate that risk.
- Training should be relevant and appropriate to the level of risk faced by employees.
- Failure to provide necessary training where a risk exists could be seen as negligence and a breach of health and safety legislation.
- Therefore, while the specific phrase “conflict resolution training” might not be in every piece of legislation, the underlying duty to ensure staff safety means that employers often do legally have to train staff to deal with conflict safely if it is a foreseeable risk of their job.
So, what sort of training provider should you use?
- One who is ‘occupationally competent’ to equip your staff with the correct:
- Knowledge
- Understanding
- Skills
- Attitude, and
- Behaviours,
Regarding the subject matter they are going to teach.
- That is different from being qualified by certification, because despite their ‘qualification’, they may never have actually dealt with conflict or experienced situations where the theory did not work.
- They may have done an online course, or been in a support function that never saw conflict in all its various forms, verbal, physical, online, violent, weapons involved, drug, alcohol induced, mental health induced etc.
- The same goes for those who claim to have ‘experience’ in conflict, e.g. Just because they may have been a prison officer, in the Armed Forces, or the Police does that mean that they have:
- Necessarily, dealt with conflict in those roles, or
- If they did, they may not have done it well, correctly, or have been exposed to the wide spectrum of different types.
- The trainer should be highly-skilled at delivering learning that is practical, useable, and clearly understood.
- They must be able to cater for all different types of learners from Visual to Auditory, kinasthetic, to analytical.
- Due to the subject matter, they must understand the difference between the 3 ‘domains’ of learning (Bloom’s Taxonomy)
- The Psychomotor domain (Physical skills/Co-ordination/The use of the body and Tools),
- The Affective domain (Feeling/Emotion) and
- The Cognitive domain (Thinking)
- Why – because they should be able to identify when someone is in the affective domain, as they may have been triggered by the subject matter, and should be brought out of that domain, to avoid potential trauma or stress, during or after the session.
- The trainer should have the correct public liability insurance to conduct even the simplest of role plays because Fight, Flight and Freeze may have been triggered by even discussing the subject matter, and delegates can react in unexpected ways!
- The trainer must understand how the brain best strengthens neural pathways to maximise the learning, and thereby ensure that you the client, are getting the maximum impact for what you are paying for.
- They must understand the best ways to help delegates remember, retain, and recall (especially when under pressure), the information they have been given – OR WHY ELSE are you paying to skill your staff up in conflict management, if when that conflict occurs, they can’t deal with, it or deal with it incorrectly, leading to injury or legal action against your company.
- Most adults learn by doing.
- The more immersive the experience, the better
- The ability to answer all the ‘What if questions’ are critical in conflict training.
In summary
If you are considering conflict management training of any type and want to do it professionally, then choose wisely and don’t be blinded by ranks, titles, previous occupations, or “qualifications” without first considering the points I have documented.
The trainer should be:
- Occupationally competent as an educator and
- Have extensive experience in a wide variety of conflict situations and environments.
You will then professionally train your staff, maximise your spending, staff abstractions, and have avoided expensive retraining, injuries, or potential legal action should things go wrong.
To discuss your conflict management, lone worker, or staff safety training needs, please contact me at:
07548 819827
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please feel free to share it on your socials and amongst your networks.
