12 Ways To Build Healthy Workplace Relationships
It’s so important to build healthy workplace relationships. Whether you work for or are an employer, it’s a major deal. Building relationships can be considered a major part of success in one’s career.
When building workplace relationships, you’re not only contributing to harnessing a positive work environment, but this has the potential to increase productivity and overall job satisfaction. Even if you dislike your job, if you have a good work environment and good relationships, you’re going to enjoy it.
It’s as simple as that.
Having good relationships with your team helps foster long-term professional relationships and improves your reputation, but it can also help with networking. In this article, you’ll learn all about the importance of workplace relationships and some helpful tips for creating some yourself.
What Are Work Relationships?
Simply put, these are interactions that you have amongst your colleagues. Building positive work relationships can help you with guidance and encouragement through your role, and it can help with your career.
Do you have to be friends with your colleagues?
Not necessarily. While it’s always great making friends with coworkers, it’s not something that needs to be required. But you should maintain a friendly yet professional relationship with your colleagues.
Elements Of A Good Work Relationship?
Understanding some of the elements of what makes a good work-related relationship is very helpful. Some of the elements will include
- Acceptance
- Understanding
- Good communication
- Trust
- Positivity
- Transparency
While other important elements contribute to making a good work relationship, these are some of the key defining ones. And try to avoid being judgmental as well. Overall, you’re going to want to be friendly. Your aim doesn’t need to be making your team into your friends; that’s only an added benefit. The goal is to create and foster positive relationships.
Tips To Build Workplace Relationships
If you want to begin building solid work relationships but don’t know where to begin, these tips will help you! It’s just important to keep in mind that you should come off as genuine, non-pushy,
Show Interest In Others’ Work
Whether this is just a casual conversation or a team meeting, you should try to ask questions. This will let others know you’re listening and well-engaged in what they’re saying. People enjoy being listened to; they know you respect them. But it’s also flattering to show your engagement through questions. If you work at Primerica, check out these Primerica reviews to find out how people feel working for the company.
Plus, whenever you’re asking questions, you’re showing others that you’re interested in their work and demonstrating how much you care. This may seem small, but a little can go a long way.
Know Your Strengths & Weaknesses
One of the very first things you should do before you begin focusing on developing new workplace relationships would include understanding yourself. Understanding yourself is going to help you massively in relationship building!
How so?
Getting to know yourself and figuring out where your weaknesses lie will help. These can be improved on. When developing relationships with others, you must be effective at communication, listening, conflict resolution, and so much more. These all will assist you in initiating workplace relationships.
So, what are the positives you can bring to the new workplace? What are some weaknesses that could be improved on? Getting to know yourself more will help improve your social skills, it helps with improving your empathy, it helps with self-awareness, and self-regulation too.
Offer Assistance
A great way to boost relationships with your colleagues would be by taking off some of the burdens they’re facing. Do you see them struggling with a project or task? Why not ask if they need some help?
Trust is a major part of building relationships; by offering your help, you’re breaking down walls that will help them out in trusting you. Always try to demonstrate this quality. It shows you’re compassionate, which is a major boost for building relationships.
Contribute To A Positive Work Environment
See if you can get active in the office and look into ways to help or chip in. Maybe you can ask leadership or management about taking on more work.
Look into attending meets and make suggestions, such as bringing in employee recognition software, or even ask if you could plan events outside of work, such as a happy hour. Showing that you care and showing that you’re contributing can speak volumes.
Don’t Overwork Yourself
Work as hard as you want with your job, but when it comes to fostering relationships, it’s best to try not to work too hard on this. Why? You don’t want to come off as a try-hard to too desperate.
That’s going to make you seem very ungenuine, fake, and even less trusting. So avoid trying to be pushy at this. Just be patient and take your time with developing relationships.
You can try to do small things here and there, such as bringing food to work for your coworkers (something small such as doughnuts for breakfast) or a Christmas or birthday card; while these are a couple of ideas, small gestures can go a long way.
Make Time For Developing Relationships
Taking time out to build relationships can increase your knowledge by so much. Sometimes the daily expectations of work can make it difficult to even say hello to someone. But it’s so important to try and squeeze in some time somewhere.
Even taking 10 minutes daily can make a massive difference in your relationship-building and communication skills. This can be during your 15-minute break, lunch break, the first or last 10 minutes of the workday, or whenever you have some additional time. Just try to take some time out of your schedule for this.
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help
Trust is a two-way street. You can’t just expect others to trust you, and you do not trust them. Having independence and self-reliability is great, but sometimes it’s better to ask for some assistance.
By asking for help, you’ll have the chance to get to know a coworker much better. Plus, if you’ve already offered assistance to coworkers in the past, you’re very likely to receive assistance as well. It’s just something that you can embrace. Let your coworkers know that you trust them by letting them bring their expertise to the field.
Don’t Take Things Personally
If someone is in the office, no matter if your team members, manager, boss, or whoever, and they’re in a bad mood, try not to let this affect you. The same can be said for criticism as well; it’s something you shouldn’t let get to you.
If you’re receiving feedback, and it’s negative, it’s best to think with a logical and professional perspective on it. It can be a bit difficult not to want to get emotional or defensive. It’s something that can be incredibly difficult. But not everything in the workplace should be taken personally, to begin with.
Always Keep Your Commitments
This also includes doing what you say you’re going to do. Real life is not like The Sims video game. It takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work to develop relationships, and it will take a lot longer to build trust. Trust is something that is hard to gain and can easily be lost.
If you tell your coworker that you’re going to do something, you better do it.
Always keep to your commitments, as this speaks volumes about the type of person you are. You need to let your team know that you’re reliable. But it’s also very important to be realistic with yourself too. If someone at work has major expectations of you, be direct if your schedule is too busy.
Always Be Kind
Kindness can go a long way, and it’s something that’s going to make people’s day better as well drastically. Showing your kindness is one of the best ways to connect with anybody.
Build Your Team Up
This can include recognizing their roles at work and how important their role is to the team, but this can include compliments here and there. Just be sincere and let them know that you see the amazing work that they’re doing.
Always Give Your Full Attention
If a coworker is talking to you, you should give them your full attention. This is going to be a major sign of respect. We indeed live in an age of continuous distractions. The main culprit of all the distractions is our phones, right?
No matter how brief the conversation is with your teammate, always give them that moment of your full undivided attention. It makes them feel important and shows that you respect what they have to say.
This is just the beginning of building healthy workplace relationships. Remember to be genuine to work with co-workers. That goes further in the long run. Let us know any more workplace friendship tips you have in the comments below!
