50 Annoying Pet Peeves to Absolutely Avoid at Work
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Like most people do, it's natural to feel nervous on the first day of a new job or taking the plunge into the professional world for the first time ever. Be it a new managerial role or your first job ever, being a little nervous is perfectly understandable. For the most part, everything works out pretty well and things eventually fall into place. However if you’re trying to be your absolute best or finding it difficult to get along with your team and other colleagues, it's possible that you’re doing something wrong.
Studies conducted by esteemed companies like WeWork, Microsoft among schools such as Harvard, Columbia and many more reveal behavioural traits that we as professionals acquire unknowingly that eventually lead to not being liked at work. Let’s take a look at 50 such Pet Peeves that could be the reason why people try to avoid you at work or you end up annoying those around you, unintentionally. We hope you can identify the problem with this article and hopefully find the solution to it.
- Professional Traits
- Coming to work when sick: let’s face it, hygiene is a highly important factor anywhere you go! No one likes a person who doesn’t care about hygiene enough. When you’re sick and can avoid going to work, do that. Now with options like working from home, it's definitely much easier to do.
- Leaving the printer out of paper: Load up. Imagine running late to a meeting and giving the print command only to find that you need to waste more time. You would hate that. Why wouldn’t someone else hate it too?
- Using other people’s mugs: Respect their privacy! Respect everyone’s privacy! Asking someone and being allowed to use their mug is a different story but using someone else’s stuff without permission is a no go!
- Being unsocial: I can’t stress this enough. When in a workplace, the environment must be made comfortable for everyone. The easiest way to do this is by making conversation. People who don’t talk to anyone else or don’t talk enough are often the annoying ones. Make conversation!
- Texting/browsing social media during work hours: This may not seem like a huge deal when your workload is low. What about the times when there’s a team crunch or the manager is swamped?
- Rubbing your success in other people’s faces: enjoying your success is great. Celebrate it by all means. Set a limit to it, though. Remember that not everyone is moving at your pace and while they might be happy for you, they need their space too.
- Hogging the sockets at the office: Charge your devices for the appropriate amount of time only because everyone at the workplace needs them. Be considerate.
- Hogging the stationery: Hoarding pencils/pens or any other stationery items is a waste of resources and is often annoying. The most hoarded item at an office is often seen to be the sticky post-its. Share things with everyone and only take as many as you need.
- Uncomfortable conversations: they arise from people talking about heated topics like politics or religion. At best, avoid these topics but if the conversation continues, be respectful of other people’s opinions as well.
- Not enough parking space: Allow enough parking space for other people in the lot as well.
- Arranging a meeting unnecessarily: most people would react to those meetings negatively that “could have been an email”!
- Following up timeframe: for a regular email, allowing 48 work hours is the acceptable time frame however it's considered best to follow up at least 72 work hours later. If you are replying to others more than 72 hours later, can you rearrange your priorities?
- Following up/calling on a weekend: weekends are meant to be for family/personal time. You could be comfortable with working over the weekends but be mindful of the fact that everyone might not be.
- Too many meetings: It's understandable that communication is important in a workplace however having too many meetings often results in the workday being swamped with interaction leaving no time for hands-on work. Depend on virtual communication. It's a new thing.