You spend 9 hours a day at your workplace, five days a week. Your workplace is one of many important places in your life, and a toxic environment anywhere can create a wrong impression. Some people leave their unhealthy home environments to come to work to feel at peace.
Not only this, but workplace politics can also heavily affect your business and its productivity.
Workplace Politics
Workplace politics is essentially a dynamic whereby human interactions involve misuse of power and authority- when people in authoritative positions use it to their advantage and for more personal gain rather than for people working under them, resulting in a strained workplace culture.
Workplace politics can decrease employee performance and morale and spread negativity. Office politics can instantly divert attention from work to a gossip party. Employees engage in gossiping, backbiting, and pushing each other down.
This habit does not just lower the morale of everyone else but spreads negative energy around the workplace. Your business may suffer heavily because the better part of your attention has been diverted elsewhere. When the focus shifts once, it is bound to move repeatedly. What this does, in turn, is that it negates the purpose of the workplace.
What Happens to the Work Culture?
The environment soon goes from everyone eating lunch together to different groups under one department. Workplace culture tends to get harmed in such a case as attention gets divided. A positive environment can substantially impact the people working in the industry, and the revenue generated by the workforce shows that. When your concentration is divided, you tend to make mistakes. Small mistakes can add up to big ones, which can become blunders.
The concentration levels differ when your workplace shifts its power dynamics to those working around the business, focusing on revenue generation. Employee satisfaction begins to improve, and responsibilities start to shift.
Miscommunication can play a role more intensely than authorities would like to think. It can spread hate, disgust, and ill will among employees. Manipulation of information can essentially take a toll on performance and the business. Employees can plot against each other and put the company in jeopardy.
The deal with politics is such that there’s no going back once you get involved.
Following are a few ways you can help understand politics in a workplace:
Comprehend the organizational chart
You can check out the organizational chart and who is in a position where. Understanding the organizational chart can help you better understand your situation and how you should deal accordingly.
Understand the network
The network you follow can help you understand how to interact with whom and where any or every decision of yours will take you. Your network is essentially your mode of connecting with your colleagues.
Build connections
Building connections will help you better understand your workplace culture, your colleagues’ personalities, and how they shift over time. Building connections can enable you to understand your flaws and strengths, work on their finesse, and tone them as per each individual and their capabilities to decipher actions.
Develop your skills
You can develop your skills by constantly working on yourself and consciously staying away from people who cause drama and spread sickness around. Your skills can be developed and toned much better if you notice how people work around you. You can pick up from what people are doing and take note of what you should not do.
Be bold but not innocent
Be bold about who you are. In a workplace, it is crucial to establish a place where you are credible, deemed respectful and looked up to. Do not be innocent because you can easily be misused for personal gains by people- thus being pushed into negativity and politics.
Be diplomatic
Be diplomatic- learn to deal with people how they understand, but ensure you get your point across. Often, people do not understand something unless it is explained in their language, thus, politics. Workplace culture can compel us to be nice to everyone, but don’t let anyone walk over us.
Takeaway
These are just a few ways to prevent anything from hindering your job performance. You are paid to generate revenue, not disregard for anyone by anyone, especially for no definite purpose.
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