Two of Your Workers Are Not Getting Along. Do This Before It Spreads
Two workers not getting along on a Sydney site? Separate the tasks same day, hear each one alone, and know the banter versus bullying line before it costs you.
Two workers not getting along, in the order that actually works:
- Separate the tasks the same day so the heat drops before anyone talks
- Hear each one alone, never together as round one
- Ask, do not opine until you have both accounts
- Decide: re-task or re-crew based on whether the friction is about the work or the person
- Test it against the bullying line from the Fair Work Commission and SafeWork NSW
- Tell the agency the same day if either worker is labour hire
Repeated unreasonable behaviour that creates a risk to health and safety is bullying, not a personality clash. At that point it is a safety obligation.
Monday. Two blokes who used to eat smoko together now stand at opposite ends of the slab. Nobody has said anything to you.
By Thursday their mates have picked sides, a tool handover has gone wrong twice, and the leading hand still reckons it will sort itself out.
It does not sort itself out. Crew conflict either gets managed or it gets bigger.This is for the site manager or leading hand who can already see it building and does not want to make it worse by wading in badly. Here is the order of operations, and the line that changes everything once it is crossed.
Table of Contents
- Why do supervisors wait too long, and what does it cost?
- Separate first or talk first?
- What do you ask in each one-on-one?
- Re-task or re-crew: which one actually fixes it?
- Where is the line between banter and bullying?
- Who handles what when the crew is labour hire?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why do supervisors wait too long, and what does it cost?
Most Sydney supervisors do not miss the friction. They see it and wait, because stepping in feels like making a small thing official.
The delay is the expensive part. Two men avoiding each other is a communication failure inside a live work sequence, and site work runs on handovers.
The first cost is never the argument. It is the thing that did not get passed on.
Tools not handed over properly. A hazard not called out because the man who saw it will not talk to the man standing under it. A task marked done that was not.
Silence between two workers is a safety defect, not a mood.Then it spreads. Mates take sides, smoko splits into two groups, and you are no longer managing two workers, you are managing a crew culture problem.
⚠️ The supervisor trap: waiting until it is "serious enough" to act guarantees the only version you get to manage is the serious one. Early is cheap. Late is a formal process.
There is also a legal reason not to sit on it. In NSW, bullying and poor workplace relationships are treated as psychosocial hazards, and the SafeWork NSW code of practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work, issued May 2021, sets out how a business is expected to identify and control them.
Nobody expects a leading hand to be a lawyer. They do expect him to act on what he can see.
Separate first or talk first?
Separate first. Same day. Before any conversation, before you decide who is right, before you even know the full story.
Split the tasks so the two of them are not working within earshot. Different levels, different areas, different ends of the job.
Drop the proximity and you drop the temperature. Then you can talk.
This is not punishment and it must not read like one. If you announce it as a consequence, you have picked a side before you have heard anything.
Frame it as work. "I need you on level 2 today, we are behind on the fix-out." That is all anyone needs to hear.
Why not sit them down together straight away? Because a joint meeting is round three, not round one.
Put two angry men in a site shed before you know either account and you get a live argument with a supervisor as the audience. Both dig in. Both perform for you.
You cannot un-say what gets said in that room.
What do you ask in each one-on-one?
Ten minutes each. Off the floor. No audience. Same questions to both men, in the same order, so neither can say you ran a different meeting for the other bloke.
The discipline that makes it work is simple and nearly everyone breaks it. Do not offer an opinion until you have both accounts.
The moment you agree with the first man, you have lost the second one.Even a nod, even a "yeah, he can be like that" travels back to the crew by lunch as the supervisor taking sides.
The five questions worth asking
- "What is actually going on between you two?" Open, not leading. Let him tell it his way.
- "When did it start?" You are testing for repeated behaviour versus one bad morning.
- "Has anything been said or done more than once?" The word that matters is repeated. This is the safety question hiding inside a friendly one.
- "Does it stop when you ask it to stop?" Banter stops. Bullying does not.
- "What would fix it from where you sit?" Most workers ask for something small. Usually just distance.
Then the closing line: "I am going to talk to him too before I decide anything." It sets the expectation and it protects you from being quoted as having agreed with anyone.
Write it down the same day. Date, names, what was said, what you did about it. Two lines in a site diary is enough.
If it ever becomes formal, the notes made before you knew it mattered are the ones that count.
Re-task or re-crew: which one actually fixes it?
Once you have both accounts you are answering one question. Is this about the work, or about the person?
Work friction is fixable inside the job. Pace, method, who is meant to clean up, a handover that keeps failing, one man carrying more of the shared load than the other.
Re-task that. Give them separate scopes with a clean boundary and the reason to argue disappears with the overlap.
Person friction is different. It follows them. Change the task and the same problem shows up in a new spot within a week.
Re-tasking a person problem does not fix it. It just moves it to a different level of the building.That is when one man goes somewhere else entirely, either to another crew or another site.
Two rules make the call for you.
Rule one: if a worker has stopped feeling safe, re-task is off the table. That is no longer a rostering decision.
Rule two: move on merit, not on volume. The loudest man is not automatically the problem, and the quiet one is not automatically the victim.
Moving the worker who complained, purely because he was the one who spoke up, teaches an entire crew never to tell you anything again.
The test that sorts it in one question. Ask yourself whether the same two men would have this problem if they never shared a task again. If yes, it is about the person and re-tasking is a delay tactic. If no, separate the scopes and get on with the job.
Where is the line between banter and bullying?
Sites run on banter. Nobody is asking you to kill it. But there is a defined line, and once it is crossed the whole response changes.
The Fair Work Commission applies the anti-bullying provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009 and treats a worker as bullied at work when an individual or a group repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards that worker or a group of workers, and the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety.
Three parts, all of which have to be there. Repeated. Unreasonable. A risk to health and safety.
A one-off comment that is not repeated does not meet the test. Neither does reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner, which the Commission expressly treats as not bullying, so directing work, correcting performance and pulling someone up properly are all still your job.
The test —is not whether it was meant as a joke. It is whether it repeats, whether a reasonable person would call it unreasonable, and whether it puts someone's health or safety at risk.
The practical version for a leading hand fits in one line.
Banter is mutual and it stops when someone asks. Bullying runs one way and it keeps going.The second half of the picture is the safety half. In NSW, bullying and harassment sit in the psychosocial hazard family, and the SafeWork NSW code of practice from May 2021 describes how those hazards are identified and controlled at work.
A person conducting a business or undertaking must eliminate psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and minimise them where elimination is not reasonably practicable. That duty does not switch off because the workers involved came through an agency.
🚧 Once it crosses the line it is not a personality clash. It is a hazard on your site with a duty attached, and the response moves from a rostering fix to a documented safety response. This article is general information, not legal advice.
The useful thing about the official test is that it takes the judgement off the supervisor. You are not deciding whether someone is being too sensitive. You are checking three boxes: repeated, unreasonable, risk to health and safety.
Who handles what when the crew is labour hire?
This is where sites get it wrong most often, and it is a two-lane problem.
The host controls the site. So the host separates the tasks, supervises the work, runs the induction, and manages the immediate risk in front of him. That does not get outsourced, and it sits alongside the rest of your host employer responsibilities.
The employment relationship sits with the agency. Warnings, formal complaints, redeployment, performance conversations and any record on the worker's file are the agency's job, not yours.
The call to the agency should be same day, not end of week. Not a complaint, just the facts.
"Two of your blokes are not working together, I have split them onto different levels, here is what each of them told me." That is the whole call.
Tell the agency while it is still a re-task. Tell them late and it is already a formal process.Worth knowing before you decide it is not your problem. For the anti-bullying provisions, the Fair Work Commission uses the definition of worker from the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, and that definition includes an employee of a labour hire company assigned to work in another person's business.
Being on the agency's payroll does not put conduct on your site outside that jurisdiction. It is the same reason psychosocial safety on a Sydney site is a shared duty rather than the agency's alone.
At Leap, conflict flags raised by a supervisor get logged against the booking, and our systems surface the pattern to an allocator when the same friction shows up twice. The AI watches the record and flags it. A human rings the site and decides what happens next. 📞
A good agency wants the early call, not the exit interview.
None of this is complicated. It is just uncomfortable, which is why it gets left, and leaving it is the only version that reliably costs you a week. If you want the wider playbook, it sits inside how to lead a labour hire crew in Sydney, alongside the communication rules that keep a crew talking after hours.
Get Started
Need a crew where the agency picks up the phone when two blokes stop talking, instead of finding out three weeks later? See what Sydney labour hire actually costs or tell us what your site needs and we will sort the crew.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a supervisor do first when two workers stop getting along?+
Separate the tasks the same day. Put them on different areas or different ends of the job before you attempt any conversation. Heat drops when proximity drops, and every account you take afterwards is calmer and more honest than one taken while both men are still within earshot of each other.
Should you sit both workers down together to sort it out?+
Not as round one. A joint meeting before you know both accounts turns into a live argument with a supervisor as the audience, and it hardens both positions. Talk to each one alone first, gather the facts, decide what you are dealing with, and only bring them together later if a joint reset is genuinely useful.
What is the difference between banter and bullying on a Sydney site?+
The Fair Work Commission treats a worker as bullied at work when an individual or group repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards them and that behaviour creates a risk to health and safety. Banter is mutual and it stops when someone asks. Bullying repeats, it runs one way, and reasonable management action carried out in a reasonable manner is not bullying at all.
Is workplace conflict a work health and safety issue in NSW?+
Yes, once it crosses into bullying or harassment. SafeWork NSW treats bullying as a psychosocial hazard in its Managing psychosocial hazards at work code of practice, issued May 2021, and a person conducting a business or undertaking must eliminate psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, or minimise them if elimination is not reasonably practicable.
When do you move one worker off the crew instead of just re-tasking them?+
Re-task when the friction is about work, such as pace, method, tools or a task handover that keeps failing. Re-crew when the friction is about the person, when the same conflict follows them onto a new task, or when one worker has stopped feeling safe. Re-tasking a safety problem just relocates it.
Who handles a conflict between two labour hire workers, the site or the agency?+
Both, in different lanes. The host controls the site, so the host separates the tasks, supervises the work and manages the immediate safety risk. The employment relationship sits with the agency, so warnings, formal complaints, redeployment and any performance process are the agency's job. Tell the agency the same day, not at the end of the week.
Can a labour hire worker apply to the Fair Work Commission over bullying at a host site?+
Yes. For the anti-bullying provisions the Fair Work Commission uses the definition of worker from the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, which includes an employee of a labour hire company assigned to work in another business. Being paid by the agency does not put conduct on your site outside that jurisdiction.
