The biggest downside of any office job: colleagues interactions

I am just back from a short surf holiday where I met some great people. The weather was fantastic, yet there were not a lot of waves so we could not surf much. In hindsight, that was a blessing in disguise and gave us as a group an enormous amount of time to have many interesting conversations all together.

One of the most meaningful ones was about job-related stress. While appreciating our lucky circumstances and the peacefulness of the moment, the conversation naturally moved into what stressed us out in our everyday lives. In the group, many people held office jobs in different companies, at various degrees of experience and function.

One thing we all shared was that no one complained about the sheer amount of work to do or the types of tasks to carry out. That was never the problem, really. The job-related stress came exclusively from colleagues interactions. Everyone had to deal with some situations where colleagues were “not communicating professionally”, some internal competition for some promotions, some annoying gossiping or just colleagues complaining about anything.

With this conversation, this phenomenon was a revelation to me.

I remember that when I was working as a waiter, for example, there was not a lot of thinking involved, and on the other hand, the job was obviously in front of me, taking the form of customers. The execution of the work was almost mechanical, each step was crystal clear. The main stressor or complain for my colleagues was ,back then, the low pay and therefore the general long-term lifestyle coming from such jobs: a lot of uncertainty, inconvenient times, a small chance to make progress in the sector, and long shifts. For the rest, it was fine. I did not take any work home once the shift finished, and I felt no stress.

When I started my first internship, where I was cold calling people, my task became much more abstract and its execution was deliberate. Getting things done was not an obvious process as before. It required a lot of thinking and decision-making. I needed to talk to and agree with colleagues, too. Now, although my office job is very different from back then, the job execution is still deliberate. There is a linear relationship between output and number of people working for physical tasks. For abstract tasks, the same relationship is much weaker.

Any mental task requires that it be done in a conscious and intentional way. Having a bad feeling about your work and colleagues is killing productivity, and very little will get done. It is hard to concentrate if your mind is somewhere else. Anything that you do with a sufficient number of people creates some stress of this type anyway. People have different minds, opinions and ways of communicating them. From these differences, conflict arises, and it needs to be managed. On the other hand, a job without communication has other downsides too.

So what did I get out of this realization? I am just more accepting of this aspect of my job, as this kind of stress is part of the game. Any other stress is, in most cases, much smaller and that’s great!

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