Your co-workers are like your family. Sometimes you spend more time with your co-workers than you do with your real family. If you don’t get along with your co-workers, it can make the work day more unpleasant for everyone. In order to get along with your co-workers and keep things positive around the office, follow these important, easy pieces of advice.
Always Be Professional
Whether you’re in the workplace or not, you should always act in a professional manner around your co-workers. Even if you develop a friendship, you need to be careful that you don’t cross the line by getting too personal. If you do get too personal with a co-worker, such as if a love relationship develops or if you crack a personal joke, it can lead to tension in the workplace, no matter how good your intentions were.
Get a Little Personal
Okay, so you don’t want to get too personal, but getting a little personal – while still remaining professional – can be a great way to get along better with your co-workers. When you spend so much time together, it’s only natural to learn things about each other and sometimes chat about things that are not work-related. Get along with your co-workers by identifying mutual interests or similarities, such as a favorite sports team, a hobby, or children around the same age. Finding some commonalities can help make your working relationship stronger.
Bring Doughnuts
If someone brings in doughnuts, cupcakes, or any other type of delicious pastry or treat, everyone in the office is appreciative and excited about it. In order to show your co-workers some good faith, bring in some doughnuts. This will automatically help you get along with your co-workers, because no one’s going to be upset or hostile over baked goods.
Don’t Suck Up to the Boss
In every office, there’s an employee who tries to suck up to the boss. Perhaps they have a lot of ambition and are really trying to advance in the company and their career, but to their co-workers they can sometimes seem like a suck-up. This doesn’t mean you can’t form a good relationship with your boss, just be careful that you don’t go so above-and-beyond that you offend someone else or make other employees look bad. If you want to get on your boss’s good side, do so in ways that aren’t so obvious to or flaunted in front of everyone else.
Don’t Gossip
Sure, a little office gossip is fun, juicy, and oftentimes relatively harmless, but other times it can lead to big rifts and resentment between co-workers. As tempting as it may be, don’t engage in any gossip around the office or about co-workers. You don’t want to be seen as someone who talks behind everyone else’s backs, and you don’t want to say something offensive that could make its way to the ear of the person you’re talking about. Avoiding office gossip will show that you’re a trustworthy, honest, and neutral person, and you’ll get along with everyone.
Jessica Walter is an avid writer and mother who loves to give advice to others on anything from parenting to handling your co-workers the proper way.