By Macharia Murigi
Are you continuously isolated by colleagues and find yourself being shunned at the cafeteria? It is possible you have joined a group of employees categorised as ‘workplace irritants’.
Irritants are employees who continually provoke annoyance among other workers, without seeing the need to apologise or correct their mistakes.
Some irritants are just driven by mischief to annoy their colleagues, while others by poor grooming on matters etiquette. Others have a natural disposition to displease other people, and never seem bothered by complaints from those affected.
THE SIGNS
You have certainly heard some employees being dismissed as too temperamental, grumpy, excessively moody, bad tempered, easily irritable and overly sensitive . If these characteristics describe your person, then you know why co-workers keep off your company. You are an irritant!
Employees who are always complaining about the workplace and management can become irritants. There is nothing wrong with raising serious concerns about the workplace, but there is everything wrong with complaining without reason.
If you are that employee who always turns minor challenges into major issues through exaggeration, and spin small matters out of control to gain attention, you have become a workplace irritant.
Team-work has become the mantra of the modern workplace. But teamwork does not however mean giving your co-workers assistance when it is not needed or asked for. Supervisors who micro-manage their juniors in a misplaced effort to control turn themselves into irritants.
Shouting at everybody at the parking yard or to friends in the streets in the pretext of greetings, but meant to show off your latest car is another source of irritation, only equal to blowing your nose loudly and noisily. These are old-fashioned characteristics best left for the medieval age.
The cell-phone has become one of the most important gadgets in modern communication technology. It has also become a major source of workplace irritability. Besides irritatingly loud tunes, some employees are also known to shout into their cells phones in total disregard of co-workers who could be busy trying to concentrate on important tasks.
INSENSITIVITY
Answering your cell-phone during meetings is not only a bad sign of irresponsibility and insensitivity to others, it’s also a totally misplaced showcase of self importance. This habit irritates other workers in similar manner like arriving in meetings and appointments deliberately late, failing to meet deadlines and failing to keep promises you have made.
Failure to turn up for scheduled meetings without acceptable excuse or apology is the worst irritability one person causes to other people.
Then there are those employees who specialise on office gossip over the private lives of other employees. Employees preoccupy themselves with the private matters of other people including their bosses or the negative side of office politics make some of the worst workplace irritants.
Withholding critical information and refusing to share your knowledge and experience with co-workers is another unforgivable sin, which irritates colleagues at the workplace. Equally guilty are those employees who display open arrogance towards less experienced employees or acting with disinterest when requests are made by co-workers.
On matters of etiquette, there is nothing that irritates colleagues like the poor and insensitive use of the toilets and other common rooms used for ablution. Use these facilities in the right way and leave them as clean as possible.
Other individuals have never heard of the term ‘decorum’ when sharing tables at the cafeteria. They will laugh loudly even when their mouths are full, and in the process end up inadvertently sharing pieces of food from their mouths and saliva with innocent but irritated co-workers.
If you are that person who reports to work half drunk or unconcerned about your foul breath occasioned by stale beer as you bend over the shoulders of colleagues asking for favours , you must realize that you are the source of irritability to your co-workers.
