A survey by LLC Inc. of over 1000 people across the US with an average age revealed that 83% of us have coworkers who annoys us, 21% have been so annoyed by a coworker they have considered quitting, and 52% say annoying coworkers prevent them from doing their best work.  Yowza - that is something.  And what don’t we like about our coworkers? We do not like complainers, laziness, arrogance (our personal favorite), too much talking, negativity, entitlement (okay so maybe this is our favorite), poor communication, oversharing, or gossipping.

So, what do you do when you’re stuck working with someone you dislike?  There are some good strategies, but first, get some perspective.  How much does it matter and are there ways of looking at it differently?

What to do:

As always, the person we control is ourselves, so when we have feelings of dislike for a coworker, looking inward can be very helpful.  Do you let your brain run with every little incident?  What do our reactions say about us?

Here is the hard one - be the grown up.  The emotionally intelligent grown up. We can stay away from the resentment spiral and remove ourselves from unproductive conversations.

Work very hard to find something you like or admire.  People are rarely just one thing and we can usually find something to like or admire.

Being anything less than respectful ends up leaving us with metaphorical egg on our faces.  Try compassion and respect - who knows, we may find ourselves surprised by the person we dislike.

If we feel pretty confident with checking in with ourselves, being the grown up, seeing the good and embracing compassion and respect, we will find ourselves in connection, which of course is the big payoff.

And if we cannot get to connect, then we can be strategic about how we expose ourselves, which includes being very intentional about what we need from the interactions we really have to have with the coworkers we do not like.

Not everyone we work with needs to be our friend or even someone we like.  While it sure is great when it happens, we can work well when we respect others and ourselves.

Survey Reveals the Most Annoying Coworker Habits - LLC.org

How to Work with Someone You Really Don’t Like