I Yelled At My Coworkers.
Question:
I work in a highly stressful job in social services. There are about 25 of us under one roof. We sit at cubes.
Our administrative assistant is near 70, and very mean and opinionated. She makes comments that people who are in the military are worthless, all drugs should be legalized, there is no such thing as a crack baby, and that little boys start masturbating in the womb. She complains all the time about how much she gets paid, how she has too much to do and so on. She is also the office tattletale.
The other day in a meeting, she butted into a topic I was discussing, and I yelled at her to mind her own business. I also yelled at another coworker for making me feel bad about a mistake I made. This woman I like, and she treats people badly because her husband was cheating on her.
Lately, I just feel like crap. I hate my job; I hear the most depressing stories all day. I can't leave, because the economy is shit, and now I am getting written up for yelling. I should never have done this, but now I feel horrible. I am not going to be fired, but I will have a note in my file. Also, I used to be the most productive employee, now I just don’t care.
Signed,
--Lost My Caring Attitude
Answer:
Dear --Lost My Caring Attitude:
You do care! That is why you took the time to send your question to Ask The Workplace Doctors. You care because you don’t want a “write-up” in your file. You care because you feel stuck in a job you have come to hate. You care because you are embarrassed for losing your temper and yelling. You care because you feel for a coworker who is in a marriage with a cheating spouse—you don’t think this is the way she should be treated. You care because you don’t think your coworkers and you should have to be bossed by an opinionated, soured and mean individual. And you care because you feel pressured. You work in a psychologically unhealthy workplace and one that is communication impoverished in spite, if not because the kind of talk that it has. The fact is that you care in spite of the fact that you feel down. You are down but you are not numb.
Can you continue to cope? Yes, you can. Many hang on to difficult marriages and jobs for years in unhealthy relationships. However that is not the way you and I want to live with a partner or to go to work. Are there things you might do to rekindle your long gone positive attitude and coping skills? Is it at least worth trying? Only you can know, but here are several options that you might consider:
1. Apologize. You might have already done that; therefore, possibly my mentioning this is unnecessary. To say, “I’m sorry” with no attempt to justify yourself might go a little way to correcting hurt feelings, especially if it is linked to a promise to professionally assert your self and not yell again. You can also submit note with this kind of statement to be entered in your file.
2. Don’t allow this loss of control incident to become an obsession. The fact is that if you don’t vent about it to coworkers it soon will be forgotten. Probably the only person to allow it to cross her/his mind is you.
3. Do your part to change the conversational rumble from non-work topics to job focused matters. It is apparent from what you report about the opinions expressed by your boss that there has been a lot of talk about personal and socially controversial issues. Shock talk and personal gossip might help pass the time but they are grist for unhelpful argument and invasion of privacy.
4. Pretend you own the place. What would you do if you were boss? “Imagineer” how you could make your work area more efficient and effective. What waste might you cut—wasted supplies, wasted duplication, wasted time, wasted energy, and wasted money? Shift your mind from petty annoyances to what might be done to enhance the quality of your product and make your clients happy. Even focus on what might be done to brighten and liven up your cubical could do much to change a hostile work environment to a more pleasant one. If this were your home, you would think of ways to reconfigure the décor just for the hell of it. Sameness is close to death. Once your “pretending” rambles about in your thoughts, they will spill out to others. Chitchat then will center less on shock and muck to the positive. Rapport, that is a more academic word for constructive rap, flows from words that change the rhythm of life.
5. Think team. Begin small. Likely there are only a few in your larger work group of 20 with whom you must interact. Huddle with some of them informally about what you might do to make your working together more effective and pleasant. Are there some things you might do to make each other’s work easier and your internal or external customers more satisfied?
6. Think outside your cubicle. If your job doesn’t require interaction, might it be possible to find some coworker with common interests? When I interviewed at Northwester Mutual Insurance a number of years ago, I was amazed by the various employee associations—choirs, crafts, support groups for various addictions, book reviews, gourmet classes, investment groups, yoga, bird watcher, biking, hiking, etc. You are not your job. You need a life outside of your workplace. Find it. Get a life by becoming caught up in some re-creative activity. I paint and have a gallery in my basement and that spills over to the walls upstairs and to my work office and to the offices and homes of others. Possibly the most spiritually revitalizing activity you might discover is volunteering as a tutor to children in your local library, reading to the elderly in homes for assisted living, joining an organization committed to cleaning up our environment, etc.
7. Take advantage of employee assistance. Our society has agencies of social service such as yours because we know that living solo is difficult—we are interdependent and we need help from each other. Social services agencies should have employee assistance for their frontline personnel. Does yours? Have you ever investigated whether it has counseling for employees who suffer depression or who are simply down—for those who feel like crap? Should your agency not have a department for employee assistance, find that outside. Some cities and counties have that. Churches have clergy who are trained to listen and help you work through this time when you feel like you don’t care.
8. Log. For example, rather than seeing your 70 year old administrative assistant as a pain in the ass, write up what you have heard from her. See her as a subject of odd interest. Why is she what she is? Possibly, if she senses you are not out to belittler her, she will tell you the story of her life. I predict, if you offered to help her write up the story of how she came to the various opinions she has, that she and you might compose a story with which both she and you would be pleased.
None of these options are a quick fix to your not caring any more. You can reject them one by one or allow them to prompt you to do more that feel horrible over an incident that resulted in a write up. You acknowledge that your job is not at risk. You are not up against a wall and you are not a target. One write up is not like a knife thrown at you and you now dare not move lest the next knife might pin you to the wall. I have often said that work is hard that’s why we call it work. Only a few of us are lucky enough to have work we love. For more thoughts, click on my associate Tina Lewis Rowe’s name on our home page. She has a terrific site and is the wisest woman I know. These thoughts are my way of saying working together with hands, head, and heart takes and makes big WEGOS. By that I mean I want you to shape your thinking and action is such a way that you feel good about what you do. If you do that, both you and your coworkers will be enriched.
William Gorden