Respecting your Colleagues in the Workplace
You want to be treated with respect in your workplace right? Well the best way to get respect is to give respect. This is of vital importance in the workplace as we spend a good part of our waking hours in the workplace and ensuring that you treat all your colleagues with respect will go a long way towards earning yourself respect too.
One of the key things to be respectful with colleagues is to respect their time. You may be having a quiet day and fancy spending 10 minutes hanging around their desk asking about their weekend or talking about your holiday but they may be on a deadline and having you try to take up valuable minutes that they need to concentrate on finishing their tasks is not going to make you very popular. So think about how busy someone may or not be before popping over to their desk or office to pass the time of day with them. Test the waters, ask them if they’re working on anything specific or even start with “Have you got a few minutes to chat or shall I pop back later if you’re in the middle of something?”
Another key area to be respectful about is to value confidences. You may get along really well with someone and they may share something very personal with you as they consider you a friend and confidante in the workplace whether it be regarding their personal life or their work life. A sure fire way to lose their respect is to repeat their confidences to others in the workplace. This will show you up as untrustworthy no matter how inconsequential you might have thought the confidence was. This will no matter affect your relationship with the person whose trust you broke but also to the people you’ve shared it with – they’re not likely to trust you with confidential information when they see first hand what you did with others trusting you.
Something that people take for granted when it comes to respecting others in the workplace is making sure you do your share of work, whether you work in a standalone role (when it will surely be noticed if you’re not completing your work / tasks / projects on time) or within a team. If you regularly turn up 15 minutes late, for example, this is show a lack of respect for others. If you come in 15 minutes late every day this amounts to over an hour a week and 5 hours a month. This is time that others have to make up in a team environment. Unless you work in a flexi-time environment, make sure you’re never late and make sure you put in your share of the work for the team. Slacking off in your job such as spending time checking your messages or social media on your phone, having too many cigarette breaks, having 10 cups of coffee or tea a day – think about how much time all these “work breaks” are taking out of your working day meaning your colleagues are having to pick up the slack. This is one sure fire way to lose respect from your colleagues and also a good way to ensure that promotion never comes your way and even get your name on the top of the list if and when redundancies happen. The worst case scenario is that your boss will notice or be told by your colleagues and you’ll lose your job.
If you’re a conscientious worker, you’ll probably not be doing any of the above but maybe someone in your team is doing this. Maybe you could print off an article like this and anonymously leave it lying on their desk, who knows? It might improve the way they behave in future…
