Addressing Workplace Impingements

Disclosure: The ideas in this post were developed through an extended discussion with ChatGPT of approximately 14,000 words. The conversation explored the distinction between disagreement, impingement, infringement, and conflict, with ChatGPT helping summarise and challenge the ideas along the way.

For years I’ve been interested in workplace conflict or micro-conflicts, but lately I’ve been thinking about something even smaller.

Not conflict.

Not even an infringement.

An impingement or someone impinging on the other player’s space.

In soccer, a player can subtly tug an opponent’s shirt. It may be almost invisible. The referee might miss it. The crowd certainly won’t notice most of the time.

On its own, it seems insignificant.

But what happens when the same player keeps doing it?

A shirt tug here.

A little push there.

A sly comment.

A subtle provocation.

Eye rolling or browbeating.

Eventually the other player retaliates. The retaliation is visible. The crowd sees it. The referee sees it.

Now the retaliating player looks like the problem.

Workplace teams can be similar.

Many interactions are not serious enough to be called misconduct or misbehavior. Yet they can still create friction:

“That will never work!”

“Why would you even think that?!”

An eye roll.

A dismissive sigh.

An unqualified dogmatic statement.

A rhetorical jab.

I call these impingements or where someone is subtly impinging on someone else.

They are small behavioural pressures that may not justify a formal complaint, but can still affect participation, trust, and a person’s willingness to contribute.

The challenge is that impingements are often hidden, while the reaction to them is obvious.

The person who finally reacts can end up looking unreasonable, while the sequence of small impingements that preceded the reaction disappears from view.

This is one reason I believe teams need a simple way to address issues early. My proposed solution is a real-time micro-conflict self-managed system called SpatzAI.

Not because every impingement is serious.

But because repeated enough times, impinging on someone can lead to infringing responses, or outright retaliation, damaged relationships, and eventually serious conflict.

Perhaps the future of workplace teamwork is not just resolving conflict.

Perhaps it is learning to notice and address impingements before conflict ever has a chance to emerge.