What about the cost in terms of production and performance when people take sick days when they are not sick, just in conflict.

The resulting loss of productivity is the same whether or not the person missing work is the one causing the or the one effected by it.

Have you done this, restructured the business around the problems or the people "causing" them? This is a frequent tactic with family businesses when the offender can't be fired.

The result is a sub-optimized organization with extra steps being added to the process, making it all the more difficult to sustain growth and profitability.

No matter how you try to remove them from the loop, they still figure out how to insinuate themselves into the situation in ways that cause problems. And if you are still able to be successful, they end up taking the credit for it.

Now if these are not enough reasons to get up and do something about the workplace at your place, perhaps this will.

Often the most devastating cost of comes from the degraded decisions that are being made, by the person "causing" the as well as the innocent bystander.

People who make the decisions in your business must have all the honest well considered input possible, in order to weigh the options, consider legitimate alternatives, and come to a conclusion.

If the process is being sabotaged with faulty input on purpose the decisions will be flawed. If the person making the decisions has a hidden agenda even though the input is accurate they can still make bad choices for the business.

Imagine the results if a decision inflates your overhead by twenty percent? Or if your profit margin is reduced by ten percent? In every business there are key decisions being made routinely that dramatically impact the future of the business. Normally we believe that they are being made honestly based on the relevant information. What if that's not the case? What if someone feels that this is there chance to get back at you?

Are you motivated to do something now? Ok, let me tell you how I work, because in most cases you can do it yourself.

The first thing to do is talk to everyone - individually, confidentially, and in private. And that included the spouses. What you're looking for is to uncover what is really important to each of them? What they want the future to be for them and their family. This is pretty simple but sometimes very hard to do because they may never have thought of things in these terms.

However when enough effort is put into figuring out and articulating what's important, people often begin to see that since the business is the vehicle for them to achieve their objectives, the and disagreements that negatively impact it - hurt them too.

In the process of isolating what's important you'll look for their opinion of the situation currently. As they talk about the way things are now, in light of their own future goals and objectives, they may begin to see the reasoning and importance of the way things are being done. Or not. Either is Ok, as long as you get it out in the open.

Once each individual has had their say it's time to put together a picture of what everyone says they want the future to look like - considered as a group. In my three decades of experience helping family businesses through this process I find that at this point there is far more agreement than disagreement.

When everyone is in the boat together and everyone is depending on everyone else to keep rowing toward a common destination - how you (or they) are holding your oars just won't matter.

Ken Blankenship is an experienced family business consultant whose web sites offer business owners a wealth of information about the challanges they're facing on http://www.fbnews.net/article_directory.html If you are a business owner wanting to leverage what you are already doing right visit the Peer Groups area of our website. If you are a business advisor wanting to maximize your potential,here are strategies we are using to generate record revenues..

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