Have you been trying to deal with a difficult colleague who is super lazy at work? Are you worried about the impact this individual is having on your work? Is it becoming absolutely impossible for you to deal with this individual? Do you find yourself tired of adjusting with the tantrums of this individual? Is it negatively affecting your energy level at work?
We all come across a colleague who is very lazy, who does not want to follow the rules, who is often found chatting around. There are the ones who choose to make an innumerable number of personal phone calls, they use the rest room very often just with the intention of whiling away their time. There are people who choose to take naps during the work hours and make it their agenda to surf the net all day. It is not very easy to deal with such kind of people, they are not very cooperating and they are not always willing to change themselves in order to make things work better for the rest of the office. These people do not take into consideration the fact that their behavior also affects the work done by the other individuals at the office. Colleagues who are lazy are often found to be ignorant of the convenience of the other individuals. The only thing that matters to them is the ways they will be able to get rid of the responsibilities that may be assigned to them.
(Image Courtesy: Evening Standard)
Under such circumstances when you are compelled to work with individuals and you are unable to find a way out of the situation, the only thing you can do is to adapt yourself to the circumstance and to be well prepared to deal with the challenge. Here are the things you can keep in mind in order to deal with lazy colleagues at work.
How To Deal With A Lazy Colleague?
#1. Please do not waste your time complaining about the behavior of this colleague. Do keep in mind the fact that you cribbing about their behavior and constantly trying to point to the fact that they are very lazy and do not accomplish as much work as you are able to do, is really not going to make a big difference. It is just going to waste your time and is going to make you feel like you are losing out on something. What your opinion is and how unfair you find it is of no importance to most people. Dealing with things in such a way will only make you feel worse about the entire situation.
#2. Make it a point that you do not allow them to prove to be a distraction for you. It is pretty obvious when you have to work with people who are lazy and do not get their work done, it will prove to be a distraction for you. At many times it is going to be so that, you will have to work on certain assignments with this individual, and you may feel like their behavior is negatively affecting the way you function. It is for such situations that you will have to keep in mind the fact that you can choose whether or not this individual will prove to be a distraction for you. We need to understand the fact that we have no control over the way others function, but we have all the power over the way their behavior will impact us. The fact that the behavior of this individual will negatively impact the productivity of this individual and will be the cause of their negative reputation is what is sure to happen. What you need to make sure is that it is not negatively affecting you. You also need to keep your emotions in control, which is the easiest way to keep distractions away from us. When you start to get annoyed by the behavior of the other person, you also let your work get hampered by that. If you can keep these negative emotions in check, you will be able to keep working properly without the other individual having any impact on you.
Just think about it in this way, why will you want the laziness of any other person to impact your work negatively? They should pay the price of their behavior, why will you face the repercussions of the negative conduct of the other person? The only thing you need to do to stop this is by controlling the way you react to this person and they will not be able to distract you anymore.
(Image Courtesy: HuffPost)
#3. Another thing that is of major importance is the fact that you will have to keep a check on your behavior. Please make sure you do not let their habits rub off on you. We all are aware of the fact that we all tend to become similar to the company we keep, that is why it is always advised that we keep a good company at all times. In this case, you will have to make sure that you do not let your self, model the habits of this individual. Please keep in mind the kind of individual you are, you must have had some aims when you joined the office, you must have wished to achieve some things, you should not let others miss conduct adversely affect how disciplined you are. You should make sure that you do not indulge in any kind of behavior that will restrict you from achieving your aims and aspirations.
#4. Make sure their work does not end up on your desk. It is true that you should, by all means, want to avoid this individual, but also make sure you keep a check on the fact that their responsibilities do not end up on your shoulder. There are lots of subtle ways to have a word with the people in authority, and let them know that the work assigned to you has been accomplished by you and you do not remain responsible for the work that has been assigned any other individual. You need to keep in mind the fact that, such people are often very cunning and will easily manage to transfer their duties to other people in such a way that they may not be able to refuse it.
(Image Courtesy: Good &Co)
#5. A very good way to be able to avoid such people is by making sure, that you are not assigned any work with these people. Often we require working in teams in order to accomplish a certain amount of work, in such cases if one individual chooses to not work whole heartedly, the extra burden often falls on the other members of the group. It will be wise to make sure you are not assigned any kind of work with this individual because you can be sure about the fact that you will be the one who will have to do all the work this person chooses not to do. It is a very simple and very smart way of staying away from lazy people you may encounter at work.
#6. Communicate properly with this individual in order to figure out what the issue is. Sometimes people may not be the way they seem to be. At times it is a good idea not to judge a book by its cover. There can be various reasons why this individual may not be performing properly at work. This may be a rare case, but there is a possibility that this person is not really lazy, but either confused regarding the work they need to do or are not being able to deal with certain work situations. There may be some genuine reason for the person to underperform.
A clear communication in such a case will be a good idea because it will help you to understand what is going in the mind of the other individual. Also, if this person is really acting lazy, a direct confrontation may be able to bring it to the attention of this person that their lazy behavior is being noticed by people and is also being perceived as negative to such an extent that they were compelled to confront them. This may also lead to them realizing the fact that a certain kind of change needs to be made in their conduct, they may choose to make the required changes and begin to perform better.
(Image Courtesy: Career Trend)
Are you facing the challenge of dealing with an individual who is lazy at work? Do you feel the above article can prove to be helpful in dealing with such a situation at work? Please comment in the box below and let us know your opinion regarding this article.
(Featured Image Courtesy: Insidify Discovery)
The atmosphere in which we are working is very crucial, as this has a direct impact on the kind of work we are able to produce. We all are aware of how the individuals working in a particular company are responsible for the atmosphere created in that company. Keeping this in mind, it is obvious that when an individual is lazy and they tend to bother the rest of the individuals working in the same workspace, it will negatively affect the collective energy of the people. As this article states, we can actually manage to make sure in what ways a lazy colleague at work will affect us or not do so.
There are some things we should take into consideration when we are talking about lazy colleagues at work.
1 These people are very cunning and they manage to get things done from other people. The often manage to pile their work on others and do not care about the kind of impact it will have over them.
2 The constant miss conduct of such people can be very irritating for the rest of the people at work. If you keep seeing an individual talking on the phone constantly and making it hard for the rest of the people to do their work with complete confidence.
3 Other things like sleeping on your desk and not responding to your colleagues properly are things that will surely have a negative impact over the work being produced.
4 This kind of behavior has a huge amount of chance of rubbing off on the other people working at the same workspace. This may be the cause of the lack of good quality of work produced by a workspace collectively.
5 This kind of behavior by one individual can cause tension between various individuals at work.
Lazy Colleagues are difficult to handle. They are surely a problem for a growing organization. The person who is not working according to the needs of the firm can be warned or maybe sometimes that person is not having enough work, hence feeling lazy. The best way to quell the person’s laziness is by following some of the steps-
-Check whether they are having enough work or not
-Keep a check on their daily work
-See if they are missing on scheduled work
-Give them incentives or perks to work
-Give them opportunities to work better
However, nothing works better than being creative with a lazy man because a lazy man knows the best way to do anything.