If you work in an organisation where work colleagues surround you, you’ll know just how important it is that you have a good relationship with them. You spend over seven hours a day with them five times a week, supposedly working towards a shared vision. And it’s not easy when you didn’t necessarily choose to work with these people but you have to face challenges and stressful situations with them on a regular basis. It’s not surprising then that when things go wrong with these relationships it can seem like the end of the world and (in some cases) can prevent you from doing your job effectively. So, it really is in your best interests to create good, solid relationships with your colleagues.

How to build brilliant relationships at work

Here are a few things you can do to help your relationships with your work colleagues. Many are office based, so if you’re not based in an office environment think transferable and decide how they would work best for you.

• If you are new, cook biscuits and take them in as a ‘thank you for making me welcome’ present. Don’t do this on your first day; no one trusts you yet so you’ll be left with a terrible complex (and a tin full of biscuits).
• Make a massive effort to learn people’s names. If you work in a big company make sure you know the most important people’s names first (that’s security and the cleaners).
• Make an effort to meet people for lunch. When you do, focus on being interested more than interesting.
• Now and then, ask about the photographs or anything personal people have on their desks. It shows you have an interest in them beyond their working role.
• Do your best to understand difficult or miserable colleagues. It may be an opportunity for you to help them with something and will establish you as a trusted member of the team.
• Meet people outside work – this will give you an all-round perspective of them and a chance to get to know them in a relaxed environment.

Dealing with difficult colleagues

I once worked as a fundraiser for a children’s health charity. By the very nature of the project, we attracted some ‘interesting’ people. The pay wasn’t brilliant but the people in the team I got to work with every day were amazing. Then a new person started who (on paper) should have been brilliant – but she wasn’t. Not only was she not so good at her job (a polite way of saying she was ‘pants’) but she infuriated everyone. It was the first time I’d experienced anything like this so I had a chat with my boss. His advice was: ‘Just get on with it.’ What the heck did that mean? I found myself sitting in a tiny open-plan office with this person who insisted that it had to be ‘her way or no way’ and on top of that she really thought she was an expert on everything. Not only that but she was loud – very, very loud!

Then one day I had to take a long car journey with her. At 7 am and with my ‘just get on with it’ hat firmly on, we set off. After an hour had passed she asked a question which really threw me: ‘Do you think I’m popular at work?’ So, what did I do? . . . Of course, I lied. I had to, there were another two hours to travel in the car and three hours back! But I did stumble across a fantastic way to help the journey pass and hopefully make her more bearable. After a couple of minutes, I asked her a question: ‘Do you think you’re popular in the office?’ That’s when it all came out. She spent 30 minutes telling me how she felt she tried too hard, how she had to push herself forward in her last job, etc. Now I wanted to help her. It was a perfect example of a ‘paradigm shift’.

At the end of that busy day she ‘thanked me for listening’ and I felt good about my support role as an amateur counsellor. I really believed the next day she would come in to the office a changed person, but she didn’t. She left shortly afterwards, no one said they missed her and she went to work with the perfect team – herself.

The point of the story is that you will often encounter difficult people at work and sometimes they are simply a bad fit for the team. If this is the case, I’m afraid it’s simply a case of riding the storm; but it really pays to take the time, as I did, to get to know them a little better. With a little understanding you can often avoid some unpleasant confrontations.