Dealing with fraught relationships at work can be exhausting

Ask people what stresses them out most about their job and problems with co-workers invariably top the list. The perpetrator may be a nasty boss or a colleague who foments dissent, but very often it’s simply the energy-sapping process of being with people who you don’t get along with.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce survey 2022, Europeans are not very happy at work. Only 14 per cent of European employees describe themselves as “engaged”, which is well below the global average of 21 per cent and even further behind the US and Canada, where engagement levels are 33 per cent.

In their commentary on this aspect of the survey, Gallup’s chief executive Jon Clifton and managing partner Pa Sinan attribute this ennui to poor people management. In their view, a bad boss is almost guaranteed to create an emotional disconnect between employees and their job.

“A manager’s effect on a workplace is so significant that Gallup analytics reveal that 70 per cent of the variance in a team’s engagement is explained just by who their boss is,” they say.

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That people and personalities play such a crucial role in shaping the working environment does not surprise workplace dynamics expert Amy Gallo who believes that life is so much easier when relationships are cordial. But recognising that human nature can get in the way, she shares her secrets for navigating the minefield of interpersonal conflict in her new book, Getting Along – How to Work with Anyone, Even Difficult People – recently published by Harvard Business Press.

“Our jobs are where we spend our days and as a result they’re also where we have some of our most intense and complicated relationships,” she says.

“What makes our problems worse is when we assume all difficult people are jerks. That just reinforces a negative dynamic. Instead, when we change our approach, we can improve our interactions and turn enemies into allies. Even better, when we navigate work relationships successfully, we build interpersonal resilience. This helps us bounce back quicker from negative interactions.”

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Gallo says an overwhelming majority of employees report working with someone who is toxic, arrogant or downright annoying and that one in three American workers has quit their jobs as a result. But what really turns a workplace scrap into something far more serious is when it becomes obsessive for those involved, something Gallo experienced first hand.

“My relationship with my [then] boss had invaded my psych and slowly, over time, had become more important – or at least more time consuming – than my relationships with the people I cared about most,” says Gallo, who characterises an unhealthy relationship at work as one that, “takes up an outsize portion of your thinking and causes you undue stress”.

Remote work can exacerbate tricky interactions as we feel disconnected from our colleagues, only seeing them in tiny squares on screens

Trying to change other people’s behaviour is usually a waste of time. Instead, Gallo suggests shifting the focus to what you can control.

“Be clear about your goals for the [difficult] relationship. Write them down and refer to them frequently,” she says. “Keep refreshing your approaches based on what you learn and be willing to abandon ones that aren’t producing results.”

Gallo identifies nine principles for getting along with anyone and eight types of co-workers who can make life hell for their colleagues, including the insecure boss, the passive-aggressive peer and the tormentor. She identifies approaches that rarely work when dealing with these types, why workplace relationships matter and how our brains can get us into trouble when a snarky email or someone turning off their camera during a video call without explanation fires up our primitive reactions to a perceived threat.

“The brain is highly attuned to incidents, no matter how small, that can be perceived as threatening,” says Gallo who points out that these instinctive reactions come from the amygdala, the area of the brain that detects fear and prepares the body to respond.

“When they kick in, we go into ‘amygdala hijack’,” she says. “It’s known as a ‘hijack’ because the fight-or-flight reaction dominates our executive functions and all too often it happens without us noticing. So we react by snapping back at a colleague, raising our voice, shutting down or sending an email we later wish we could take back.”

Dealing with conflict is hard enough in person, but remote working has made it even more difficult, Gallo says.

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“Remote work can exacerbate tricky interactions as we feel disconnected from our colleagues, only seeing them in tiny squares on screens,” she says. “Misunderstandings and tensions are going to arise, and each team needs to decide how they’re going to handle them. Secondly, everyone needs to be much clearer about their intentions.

“It’s far too easy, in the heat of the moment, to type a retort you wouldn’t say if you were looking someone in the eye. It’s also harder to repair a situation gone awry. We can’t rely on a laugh by the coffee machine to smooth things over.”

Gallo suggests bearing in mind that relationships are often in the eye of the beholder and that it’s easy to read things into situations that don’t exist.

“You might think you have an unhealthy relationship with someone but they haven’t a clue you feel like that,” she says. “In fact, they may think the relationship is perfectly fine or neutral or even positive. Your perspective is just one perspective. Sometimes you have to ask yourself what assumptions I am making and what if I’m wrong?”