Why good co-workers are important
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For you working at a 9–5 your work environment is extremely impactful when it comes to how you feel about your job. One of the biggest influences on how you feel is the quality of your co-workers. Here are 3 ways your co-workers are important to your 9–5 and what you can do to find good co-workers.
- Interpersonal work and being nice
Most of the work that you do in your 9–5 job or in most jobs involves working with co-workers. Whether its working on a spreadsheet or stocking shelves, you will be working with other people, so its always good to work with people who have good interpersonal skills. Before you get the job or promotion you won’t be able to fully tell, but there are ways that you can see if they have good interpersonal and work skills. You can see how their unit works and how they interact with them, you can see what type of work that they do or how hard they work, and you can talk to other people. All of these things need to be taken with a grain of salt because its not a full picture of how they act. But the common theme is that you want to work with people who will do the work and not treat you poorly. While this seems like common sense its very difficult to find. One of the best ways you can find out the interpersonal relationships and build them, is by interacting with the people you work with. Watch them when they work and how they interact with others, get to know them so that you know what kind of people you are working with. It should also go without saying that everyone wants to be treated nicely, a lot of this is treating others how you want to be treated. But if you treat someone well and they continue to treat you poorly that is a sign that the staff that you work with will make life very difficult for you.
2. A good manager
One of the most reliable things that can signal that you have good people working with you is if the manager that you have is a good manager. Good managers tend to attract great people to work with because they make a great work environment. Great managers foster a learning environment that gets longer tenured staff helping new ones and retains them. More often than not those staff will be great co-workers for you. Bad managers tend to not be able to retain staff, so you may still see good co-workers, but they won’t stay long.