If you had to describe the relationship you have with your coworkers, what would you say?
Everyone’s there to make money, sharpen their skill set, and provide excellent results, but that’s not all it takes to succeed in the workplace. If you genuinely want to work your way up and do so with a positive attitude, it’s essential to develop friendly, productive relationships with colleagues.
Research by Gallup found that a whopping 85 percent of employees worldwide feel disengaged from their jobs. On top of that, 71 percent of U.S. employees said they’re actively searching for new job opportunities. Although there could be multiple reasons why this is the case, it helps to create positive connections in the workplace to produce effective results and stay motivated.
Let’s look at three tips you can try out to build positive work relationships with your colleagues.
1. Communication is key
It’s easy to make assumptions about coworkers if you don’t know them well. Perhaps you saw that they opened your email but failed to respond or they didn’t complete a task on time. Rather than assuming the worst, give them the benefit of the doubt. According to recent studies, 75 percent of employees say they can’t service customers due to disjointed communication in the workplace.
Whatever the case may be, practice open communication to get to the bottom of issues or concerns. It reduces FOMO (the fear of missing out), which causes stress and anxiety based on the fear that you’re missing out on important details. Your colleagues feel more entitled to keep you in the loop when they know you’re hands-on with the information.
Sharpen your skills by learning how to get across to your coworkers authentically. Admit when you’re wrong or when you’ve made a mistake so you can remedy it. If someone asks you something and you don’t know the answer, say so. These actions establish credibility and let people know you’re an honest, reliable person. It helps to develop positive, trustworthy relationships within the workplace.
2. Collaborate effectively
Whether you and your colleagues need to perform customer service training or tackle a project from a new client, your collaborative efforts must be top-notch. How team members work together determines a business’s success. If collaboration is weak, the results won’t be nearly as effective, and the team as a whole won’t be as productive. Research shows that, when organizations have engaged, connected employees, productivity improves by 20-25 percent.
So, it’s essential to develop collaboration skills and techniques so it’s easy to work with others and complete tasks. Check-in regularly with your team to ensure everyone’s opinions and thoughts are heard. Ask for feedback about what they think the best decision for the company is and who should work on what. Asking questions is essential to gauge how people work best and what you can do to reach your goals collectively.
When you know how your coworkers work best, it gives you insight into what they need to succeed and how they can get there. If you have access to tools, resources, or relationships that might help them, share that knowledge. They’ll be grateful you lent a hand and will remember the kind gesture, which will likely benefit you later on.
3. Use proper email etiquette
If you aren’t leveraging proper email marketing etiquette in the office, it’s best to start right away. On average, there are 126 business emails sent and received every single day between colleagues in 2019. That’s enough to induce a headache for employees as they have to filter through each one.
Use proper email etiquette with your colleagues. When sending an email, leave no room for guesswork and write a straightforward subject line that tells recipients precisely what it entails. Only include coworkers in an email if it’s relevant to them. If not, it’ll come across useless, and people won’t take your future emails seriously. Sending work emails to people who don’t need them clutters their inboxes and builds frustration.
It’s also crucial to respond to your team’s emails promptly. Few people expect you to reply within minutes, but don’t keep them waiting for more than 24 hours, especially if it’s an urgent matter. This shows carelessness and a lack of courtesy, which won’t help you build solid work relationships.
Over to you
It’s not easy navigating through the motions of the workplace, but it’s much easier to do when you build positive rapport with everyone on the team. These are people you have to interact with for most of the week, so if it’s a chore to do so, it’s time to take steps to create positive, productive relationships.