Handling Difficult Colleagues In The Workplace

In the world of work, collaboration and teamwork are often the keys to success.

However, it’s not uncommon to encounter difficult colleagues along the way. These challenging individuals can make the workplace less enjoyable and hinder productivity.

Fortunately, some strategies can help you navigate these choppy waters and maintain your composure while working alongside them.

Maintain Professionalism

When dealing with difficult colleagues, it’s crucial to maintain professionalism at all times. Avoid responding to their negative behaviour with negativity of your own. Instead, stay calm, composed, and focused on your work. Responding professionally not only sets a positive example but also reduces the likelihood of escalating conflicts.

Seek Understanding

Try to understand the root cause of your colleague’s behaviour. Are they experiencing personal issues or facing work-related challenges? Sometimes, problematic behaviour can be a result of underlying stress or frustration. Showing empathy and being a good listener can help you gain insight into their perspective and potentially diffuse tension.

Open Communication

Effective communication is the cornerstone of resolving conflicts with difficult colleagues. Initiate a private, one-on-one conversation with them to address the issues. Be specific about the behaviour causing problems and express your feelings using “I” statements. For example, say, “I feel frustrated when you interrupt me during meetings,” instead of blaming them directly.

Set Boundaries

Establish clear boundaries to protect yourself from repeated difficulties. Politely but firmly assert your limits when necessary. For instance, if a colleague consistently disrupts your work, kindly request that they respect your workspace and focus time.

Document Incidents

Keeping a record of problematic incidents can be invaluable, especially if the behaviour persists. Document dates, times, and descriptions of the events. This documentation can serve as evidence if you need to involve HR or management in resolving the issue.

Involve a Neutral Party

If your efforts to resolve the situation directly with your difficult colleague don’t yield results, consider involving a neutral party, such as a supervisor or HR representative. They can mediate the discussion and help find a solution for everyone.

Handling difficult colleagues is a challenge many professionals face at some point in their careers.

However, you can navigate these challenges by maintaining professionalism, seeking understanding, practising open communication, setting boundaries, documenting incidents, involving neutral parties when needed, and focusing on self-care.

Remember that the goal is to create a harmonious work environment where everyone can thrive, and these strategies can help you achieve just that.

Better Work Habits For Better Workplace Wellbeing

Implementing healthy habits in the workplace is the cornerstone for improving productivity and concentration and ensuring long-term health and wellbeing.

Whether laborious or sedentary, your work impacts your overall physical, mental, social and emotional health status. Therefore, it is imperative to take responsibility for your own workplace habits.

Consider introducing some of the following:

Stress Management

Work can be complex and demanding at times, and alongside personal issues, the average worker can become overwhelmed quite quickly. Employees operating under high-stress levels are more likely to suffer from illness, absenteeism and, in some cases, burnout.

Warning signs of high levels of stress may include struggling to cope with tasks and responsibilities, an imbalance between work and home life, feeling undervalued by managers and co-workers, or using unhelpful coping strategies such as drinking too much or using drugs.

Fortunately, there are ways to prevent and cope with stress effectively. There should be clear boundaries between work and personal life; set rules for yourself, such as not checking emails after hours or spending time on a hobby without thinking about work to adopt a healthy balance between the two.

Those struggling to switch off from work outside business hours may want to experiment with stress-relief strategies such as meditation or yoga or staying connected with friends and family outside of work. Learn to practice assertiveness in work situations; for instance, say no to extra work or ask a colleague for assistance with a challenging task.

Move More Often

Sitting for extended periods of time is harmful to your health. Office workers, in particular, will benefit from moving more often throughout their usual workday. Some ways to reduce sitting time include having walking meetings, visiting a colleague at their desk rather than sending an email, standing to take calls, taking the stairs and not sitting on public transport.

Short, regular breaks are another way of splitting up desk time; aim to move for a few minutes every hour or so. Simple activities such as stretching, changing your posture and moving your arms and legs at work can make a big difference.

Incorporate regular exercise into your daily routine before, during or after work, to help counteract the effects of sitting. Utilise your lunch breaks to cram in exercise by joining a lunchtime exercise class or teaming up with a colleague to go for a run.

Check Your Ergonomics

Avoiding sitting altogether is unrealistic for many workers. However, there are ways to improve your ergonomics and office environment for better health.

First and foremost, developing proper posture is critical. Poor posture can quickly become second nature and consequently result in back and neck pain. To adjust your posture while sitting, ensure your ears, shoulders and hips are aligned vertically and maintain a constant awareness of your posture.

When using a computer, keep your feet flat on the floor and have your computer monitor at eye level. Ensure your keyboard is positioned so your forearms are parallel to the floor, and use your whole arm, not just your wrist, when using a mouse.

Why Are Team Meetings So Important In The Realm Of Hybrid Work Environments?

Working in a business with flexible working options? Flexible working means that business practices have had to change, particularly team meetings. Once team members could be reliably found during the work day in the office, now you may be a little harder-pressed to have everyone available for a team meeting in person.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not impossible.

A team meeting, at its core, has the purpose of sharing information efficiently and provides scope for discussion around what is being shared.

If you have employees working away from the office, it can be a good idea to touch base with them through a regularly scheduled meeting. It’s also an opportunity for those within the office to organise a time for effective communication about work.

A good team meeting assists teams in aligning on the topics of discussion, airing any concerns or obstacles, and clarifying future actions.

Generally, it can be used to glean an update on how the projects are overall progressing and if there needs to be further action from other members to assist in the progression.

The exact purpose of a team meeting is decided by the topics in the agenda, the business needs of the meeting, and your organisation.

Your team meeting might be business-critical, where company developments or valuable information or training are shared. It provides them with an avenue to ask for help or to gain answers to their questions about tasks. Team meetings can also be where your staff can spend time together informally and share their thoughts.

Not only does a team meeting allow you to catch yourself up on what your team is currently working on (and get you acquainted with how things are travelling), a team meeting also allows you to:

  • Improve and boost team morale
  • Ensure that your team is constantly learning and upskilling
  • Provide transparency within the team about what is happening, when and why
  • Allow the team to have the chance to recentre themselves and know their set priorities and goals for the next month.

As long as there is regular communication between team members during the meetings, issues can be brought up, actioned and resolved quickly during team meetings.

So that your team meetings are run effectively, ensure that you are fully prepared with what you require from them. Making a list of topics for discussion, how the projects are progressing, and any immediate concerns you might have will help facilitate discussions during the meeting.

Make sure to schedule them in advance so that all team members involved are able to attend, as this allows for both remote and face-to-face members to have their say.

4 Methods To Keep Stress From Taking Over Your Life Completely

A certain level of stress is expected when running a business. Unfortunately, it can grow to be a significant issue for many entrepreneurs.

Excessive or overwhelming stress levels can interfere with productivity and harm physical and emotional health.

However, just because such stress is impossible to avoid doesn’t mean it should be allowed to dictate our lives.

Managing stress levels is not about making a big lifestyle or career change. Instead, individuals can learn to manage their stress levels with a few tweaks to how they perceive and respond to stressors.

Socialise

Regularly seeing friends can help decrease stress hormones. Maintaining strong social connections can prevent feelings of loneliness and isolation and create a sense of belonging. It can also increase a person’s sense of self-worth, benefiting everyone, especially entrepreneurs facing difficult business times.

Eat Well

Eating the right food can reduce stress levels and improve your mood. While many stressed people opt for foods with high sugar levels, like muffins and cakes, the instant pick-me-up that they provide is short-lived. Eating whole-grain carbohydrates can help boost productivity levels and avoid sugar’s ‘roller coaster ride’ effects.

Relax

Relaxation techniques, such as meditation and yoga, can be instrumental in combating acute and chronic stress.

Allocating a specific time to relax daily is critical in preventing and managing stress. Sleeping is an effective way to promote body and mind recovery. Studies have shown that a lack of sleep can have a more significant impact than having a poor diet.

Making sure you have sufficient sleep every night can help you to get through stressful situations. Adopting healthy behaviours, such as switching off from work-related activities at a specific time each day, can also help work towards a work-life balance.

Exercise

Even when busy, making time for health is extremely important. As well as being significant for physical health, exercise is an effective stress reducer that can help maintain a well-balanced mental state.

Exercising releases endorphins and can shape your mood depending on the activity, helping you feel energised or putting you in a calming, meditative state. Being active for at least 30 minutes daily can reduce stress levels and stimulate your body’s endorphins and other natural chemicals acting as mood elevators.

Small Business Leadership – Do You Have What It Takes?

Are you a leader just because you run a small business? No. But you probably need to be.

The role of leadership in business is indisputable. Great leaders create great businesses. Mediocre leaders create mediocre businesses. Without business leadership, a business will circle around aimlessly until it eventually runs out of power. For a business to succeed, effective and active leadership is needed.

But what is leadership really?

The definition of good leadership in the modern day is much different to the traditional concept of being a directing chief at the top of a hierarchy. More importantly, good leadership requires attitudes and behaviours which characterise and relate to humanity.

Good leadership involves serving the organisation and the group of people within it. Ineffective leaders tend to invert this principle and view leadership as an opportunity to acquire personal status, advantage and gain at the expense of others. Good leadership is, in fact, the exact opposite.

Good leaders are followed chiefly because people trust and respect them. Gaining the trust and respect of employees in the workplace can be easy if approached correctly.

A good leader will:

  • make an effort to know their staff, their personal needs, their goals and their desires;
  • provide the team with direction;
  • keep the team focused;
  • help each team member to give their best efforts;
  • ensure the team has the resources they need to complete tasks;
  • step in when they see that things could be done more effectively;
  • take charge when an emergency situation arises;
  • provide encouragement and feedback;
  • deal with customers in a service capacity and not just as an order taker;
  • strive to deliver sterling results;
  • get in and give a hand;
  • make sure everybody counts, and everybody knows they count;
  • know when to meddle and when to let go;
  • know their objectives and have a plan on how to achieve them;

The value of businesses is shown to be higher when decent leadership is in place. To improve business and to move an organisation from a ‘mediocre’ status to one that is ‘great’, an employer should follow these steps and develop the good leadership required for their business to grow and prosper.

Strategies For Negotiating Conflict Within The Workplace

Conflict within the workplace can become a problematic issue to resolve if handled improperly.

You don’t want to be caught in the middle of a dispute when in the workplace. Whether it’s between workers, employees against the manager or even an issue existing between the senior-level staff, conflict can be a sensitive issue.

That’s why if you have conflict in the workplace, you need to carefully handle it so it doesn’t escalate.

The following are practical strategies to respond to conflict that may arise:

  • Focus on the behaviour and events as opposed to personalities. Rather than generalising a behaviour as the problem, discuss what went wrong in the specific situation.
  • Listen to what both parties are saying. Both people might have different perspectives on what went wrong and there may be validity to both sides. Clarify the situation in detail with both parties separately before you discuss it with them together.
  • Identify the points of agreement and disagreement. The issues that individuals agree on will help establish some understanding, and variances could help create potential solutions.
  • Prioritise which aspects of the argument needs to be dealt with the most and address those first. Minor disagreements can be settled over time, but major ones should not be set aside.
  • Develop a plan for each individual to work on to resolve that conflict. Setting a time frame and goal for what you expect to achieve from the plan for both parties will help follow-up assessments of the situation.
  • Follow through with your plan by ensuring that the conflict has been resolved over time. This could involve talking to both parties about their perspective on the matter and checking whether the source of conflict has been addressed.

Not every conflict can be approached in the same manner. Different circumstances, conditions and more can impact how a conflict may need to be resolved.  Ensure you understand the situation and listen to the individuals involved carefully before deciding how to respond.

5 Highly Attractive Job Skills To Have On Your Resume

Communication, teamwork and problem-solving. These common “buzzwords” are generally present in job advertisements because recruiters are looking for specific kinds of people who are already in possession of these highly valuable, transferable job skills.

These transferable job skills are ones that you may have picked up and developed in previous positions or roles, and which can easily be applied in the new role.

If you are a current job seeker or looking for your next career path move, being able to prove that you are in possession of these skills on your resume could be the difference between making it through to the next round or not.

These transferable skills can be upskilled like any other developable skillset and should be done if you wish to remain relevant or gain advantages over others.

In your resume or during the interview process for a job, you should address the most common transferable job skills that you may already be in possession of. Common ones that many people are already familiar with and have may include:

  • Problem-solving skills – allows the analysis of a situation to identify underlining complications and generate potential solutions in order to implement the best one.
  • Communication – effective communication means an applicant can convey information and messages so there is little confusion as to the intended meaning of the original message.
  • Self-management – this shows recruiters that you are able to give critical tasks focus and undivided attention, which shows productivity and professionalism.
  • Teamwork – this is to do with your ability to work well with others, and towards a common goal.
  • Technical Competence – most commonly this will involve being able to use technology appropriately and fluently.

When it comes to the current business environment, having these highly valuable skills within your resume and being able to prove them through your listed experience can turn your application into one to be considered.

Why Is It SMART To Set Goals?

Setting goals is a simple and effective way to boost your productivity and project a plan for your future progress.

Stating out your personal daily goals as well as long-term goals is a good way to get started and can inspire you to improve yourself during these challenging times.

The SMART strategy is an excellent method to follow for practical goal setting.

  • Specific: Ensure your goals are planned in detail so that you have a clearer understanding of what you want to achieve.
  • Measurable: Having measurable and quantified goals means you can record your progress and know exactly when you have achieved them.
  • Attainable: Your goals also need to be realistic and achievable. Having goals that are too far out of your reach (at least for the time being) may instead demotivate you.
  • Relevant: Keeping your short-term goals relevant to your broader, long-term goals will help you stay on track.
  • Timebound: Set time limits for your goals to keep yourself accountable and driven to achieve them.

You can also implement this measure in a business setting or a personal/private environment.

For example, you may have a business goal of gaining five new clients over the quarter. Is this measurable? Is it attainable? Is this short-term goal relevant to your broader, long-term goal?

Discuss with your colleagues or employees precisely their goals for their time with the business. Is it to attain new skills or to improve on existing ones? Does it align with KPIs, or is it a goal to allow for self-improvement?

Whatever your reason, having a strategy for setting goals can be a game-changer. Why not give it a try?

Remote, Hybrid Or Office-based, Here’s 3 Ways To Smooth Out Your Work Days

More and more businesses are pushing forward hybrid roles – part-time in the office, part-time WFH.

Ensuring your workstyle practices allow you to seamlessly integrate between working from the office or working from home is crucial. Try adopting these changes to make your transition into the office space more manageable.

Structure Your Daily Routine

Working in an office space structures your day, and this is an important feature to bring into your workday, even when you’re working from home. Create a work-based routine that works for you at home and the office.

For example, you may find that using the first hour of the day to respond to emails and enquiries and using the later part of the day for meetings works best for you. It is important to stick to that routine as best as you can to then provide yourself with some structure when moving between workspaces.

Prepare For Distractions

Without the common distractions that an office space comes with, employees may find that they are more productive at home. However, there may be some distractions in the home that the office is without (such as interruptions from family, etc). Consider incorporating collaboration meetings and calls into your work day when working from home.

Brainstorming sessions and daily stand-ins can be great ways to reintroduce socialisation with your colleagues to make social interactions productive and less distracting when working from home or in the office. Consider setting boundaries if you need to reserve portions of your day for important tasks, and let your colleagues know so they don’t distract you.

Maintain Stability

Working from home has left employees much more free time during the day, allowing them to pick up new hobbies and interests. These activities may have been a source of relaxation when working from home, so try to continue indulging in these activities once you transition back into working from the office part of the time. Upskilling for personal fulfilment can be rewarding and even contribute to better mental health and well-being.

Feel Like Your Job Has Stagnated? Here Are Two Reasons To Stay (And One To Leave).

Have you been feeling a sense of stagnation while performing your job? Are you struggling to stay motivated or lack a sense of professional purpose? You might need a professional seachange to your career- but it doesn’t have to be a monumental process.

It’s not uncommon to think about your career in terms of progressing from point a to b to c. Career progression is often a linear concept in many people’s minds, with hiring processes tending to not hire outside of our industry or across skill sets.

Making a choice to switch careers can be daunting and not without its challenges. For instance, to make a cross-industry chance, you may have to go back to the very beginning of your career, retrain and reprove yourself, and sacrifice your current level in your career to do so.

Consider these three reasons behind whether or not you should stay or leave your current career rather than drop everything and go.

  • If you’re happy with the company’s culture, and get along well with your boss and co-workers but feel like you are not growing as you should, stay. You could do external self-education to further your skills or ask for more challenging work to broaden them.
  • Unhappy with your company’s workplace culture, struggle with leadership and politics but are still learning from your work? Stay, as it’s an excellent opportunity to grow your stakeholder management skills further and learn how to influence and negotiate in challenging situations.
  • Leave if you aren’t learning, are bored and do not like the culture of the company. This can be for the best, particularly if it impacts your mental and physical health.

Challenging yourself with difficult situations can further your career growth. Still, it’s essential to recognise and respect whether or not those situations will help stimulate your growth.