What HR Can Do to Stop the Big Drivers of Workplace Conflict in 2026

This will likely prove to be another year where we see growing amounts of workplace conflict between workers.

A study by SHRM of 1,000 U.S. employees showed that 57% experienced or witnessed incivility at work weekly; a poll of the same sample from 2025 showed that 74% are having to adjust the way they communicate at work to avoid conflict.

Reasons to Combat Workplace Conflict

There are a myriad of reasons workplaces need to tackle this, with protecting productivity and reputation being two of the top priorities. This is going to affect your bottom line, too: A study by Oxford University reported a strong positive correlation between employee well-being and a company’s value and profitability.

We see four common drivers that HR leaders need to tackle to keep one step ahead.

1. Growing Further Apart

Our team is observing that the increasing polarization of society is inevitably bleeding into workplaces and directly affecting people’s ability to work together.

With a volatile political and wider world, there is widespread intolerance for other people’s views, and it’s stopping people from collaborating with colleagues they perceive as on ‘the other side’ of the divide.

A 2025 survey of 2,000 U.S. adults found that 64% experienced or witnessed political conflict at work that year. Furthermore, 11% say the number of disagreements has escalated, and 8% report they have become more hostile or disruptive, highlighting that this is a growing issue.

How can workplaces tackle this? Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer suggests employers may actually be better-placed than anyone. They were ranked as the best institution to broker trust between people, with a better performance score than NGOs, the government, and the media.

But, to be clear, that brokering will not just happen. Organizations and their leaders have to promote the idea that everyone has to put individual differences aside if we’re going to be productive. Our recent experience is that this is something most leaders and managers feel increasingly ill-equipped to do.

The challenge is that we’re simply not used to talking about these things at work – in fact many of us have actively steered away from politics, religion, etc. Plus, we don’t have the relationship foundations with work colleagues that we might with a parent or close friend. But we do still have a common interest in helping the company succeed. That message needs to come from HR and leaders, and be felt across the entire organization.

2. The Culture of ‘Me’

Related to this ongoing polarization – but also deserving of a dedicated section – is how modern life is increasingly designed around the individual. Our social media feeds are tailored by algorithms, advertising is targeted to our personal preferences, and we decide exactly which shows we watch and when. As AI becomes more embedded in the workplace, even the answers we receive to our questions are customized to us as individuals.

This individualization is starting to shape how people show up at work. Employees are more likely to prioritize their own needs and expectations over those of the wider team. Tensions around hybrid working illustrate this clearly: Discussions often centre on “How often do I have to be in the office?” rather than “What difference does my presence make to my colleagues?”

Over time, this mindset weakens the sense of shared community at work. That sense of belonging has long been a key part of the implicit agreement between employers and employees. Its erosion is helping to create conditions where disagreement and conflict are more likely to arise.

To combat this, companies could consider facilitating working group discussions on where individual flexibility meets company needs. This probably needs to encompass hybrid work, communication styles and commercial priorities. Helping people understand that contrast exists and providing opportunities to meet in the middle can be rewarding work. 

3. The Generation Gaps

Another big driver of conflict: stereotypes about age groups now circulate faster and more widely than ever, while workplaces have increased generational spread.

Algorithm-driven news feeds and meme culture encourage oversimplified and often damaging assumptions about how different generations think, behave, and work. The result is a steady erosion of trust, with resentment taking root sometimes even before people have actually worked together.

These assumptions surface most clearly in day-to-day communication. Digitally native employees tend to rely on online platforms as their default space for collaboration, debate, and expression. For colleagues who built their careers before this shift, the same behaviors can feel informal, distracting, out of place and possibly disrespectful. A simple emoji in a project discussion can be interpreted as either clarity or carelessness, depending on who’s reading it.

One solution here is dedicated training that gets to the root cause. Internal bias sessions can help workers recognise assumptions like this. We all make them, and we need to understand how they impact our ability to work together productively.

Addressing this through multi-communication approaches is also important. Written formats such as Teams or Slack are just as important, given the widespread use of these relatively new tools in the workplace, where people are now adopting social media anonymity behaviors (despite not being anonymous).

4. Managers in the Middle

One thing in common with all of these different drivers of conflict is that the impacts tend to land squarely with managers.

Supporting such a wide range of expectations, habits and preferences is no small task — and it helps explain why we see line management disputes feature so prominently. SHRM research shows that when U.S. workers leave a job because of the culture, 58% claim their manager is the main reason.

When did the manager’s role expand to include translating between communication styles, balancing competing norms, mitigating political disagreements and actively challenging generational bias — all while keeping the work moving forward?

This translates to almost superhuman expectations now on managers to solve every people puzzle.

More realistically, we need to nurture managers who can create and police neutral settings and enforce protocols that prioritize collective output over personal preferences; we need robust containers in which diverse work styles can coexist; and we need managers who are upskilled in detecting and appropriately handling early-stage workplace conflict. All of which can be taught.

To do this, we are seeing a shift in manager development away from fictional classroom scenarios and towards pattern-based rehearsal of real moments. Using new AI tools, managers can practice their situations: The underperformance they’re avoiding, the conflict they’re sugar-coating, the decision they’re delaying and the feedback they’re softening.

It’s undeniable that workplace conflict will grow this year. Can we stop it? Of course, we can. But the first step is accepting and addressing these very real movements, and taking action against them.