Careers advice

How To Survive Your Colleagues At Work: 6 Tips

Unfortunately, office colleagues are not always a pleasure to work with: here are 6 tips to help you survive!

It’s important to have a good working environment. Everyone wants to work with friendly and amusing people: colleagues with whom you can also enjoy a pleasant evening out.

But sadly it doesn’t always work out that way. Your colleagues are unlikely to be ideal, and may even try to thwart you for their own ends. So here’s how to survive those annoying colleagues.

Tips on how to survive your colleagues at work

  1. Be aloof: our first survival tip is not to get too bothered about anything they do. And to take no notice of anything they say. The important thing is that you do your job properly. Your boss will appreciate the results!
  2. Smile: even if you don’t particularly like your colleagues, you have to spend most of your time with them. So try to be the first one to smile, and establish a bit more than a working relationship. This is one of the best ways to feel happier at work.
  3. Don’t badmouth others: don’t pass on malicious remarks about your colleagues. This is a very risky way of trying to join a gang. You will soon be regarded as untrustworthy.
  4. Remember that they’re not your family: a bit of detachment is very important if you want to survive at work. Don’t take on the burden of your colleagues’ problems. Help when you can, but not to the detriment of yourself or your work.
  5. Request some team building activities: if you notice that the situation at work is getting really bad, you could ask your boss to organise some outdoor team building activities to help create group unity.
  6. Be strong: that’s always good advice, but remember that you can only count on yourself in life, so be strong and be brave!