Why it’s essential to get on with your colleagues
By: Elliott, redwigwam
If you work, especially if you work full-time hours, it probably feels like you spend more time with your colleagues than your own family during the working week.
So, isn’t it a good idea to make a conscious effort to form good relationships with your co-workers?
There is nothing worse than working in an environment with a bad atmosphere or noticeable tension. It brings you down, it brings your colleagues down, and it brings morale down.
Inevitably, you’ll dread the thought of going into work and be miserable at the end of the day.
Maintaining good relationships with your colleagues (and this includes your manager), is essential if you want to enjoy your job, and if you don’t want to be someone who brings problems from work home with them every day.
However hard you try to keep your private and work life separate if work is making you miserable, it is inevitable you’ll take your work woes home with you.
So how do you avoid this?
Having good, open and honest relationships at work means you have people there to turn to in times of need. Your colleagues are absolutely the best people to understand your work-related worries and problems – but they can also laugh with you, and encourage you.
In return, you can do the same for them – and immediately, your workplace will feel more like a place where you feel comfortable and looked after.
Relationships like this between colleagues will also boost morale in the office. In turn, high morale will boost productivity – and results.
It seems obvious, but when you and your colleagues feel good and have positive mindsets, it reflects in your work output.
Of course, it would be silly to suggest this will be the case every single day.
But, on those days where you don’t feel too upbeat or productive, your relationships with colleagues comes into play. Having no relationship with them means you’re likely to feel downhearted for the whole day. But, having a good relationship with them, means there will be some sort of understanding there, and you won’t feel alone.
A good relationship with your colleagues means much more than just a friendly ‘hello’ in the lift or the staff room.
It means getting to know the people you work with as friends and on a more personal level. Ask them questions. Take lunch with them every so often. Offer to make them a drink.
Of course, you don’t have to socialise outside of work every week, but making a conscious effort to take an interest in their lives, will make a big difference to how you, and they, feel about your workplace.
