22nd November 2007

Is your workplace like the Garden of Eden? Probably not. No workplace is perfect. And while we can usually perform well around people who have a wide range of idiosyncrasies, some behaviours just get under our skin.

Most of what we consider to be bad habits and tendencies in other people - commonly known as "pet peeves" - are simply speed bumps in the road. We tolerate them, but they're not something we look forward to everyday.

Why do they bother us? My view is that the offending behaviour goes against our value systems. When somebody behaves in a way that's contrary to what we regard as acceptable, our sense of right and wrong jumps up and says "that's wrong!"

Wikipedia's entry for pet peeve is "a minor annoyance that can instil great frustration in an individual."

The top offending behaviours in a recent survey? Line up 10 people, and six of them will be offended by gossip. Five and a half of them will be offended by other people's poor time management skills, and four and a half of them will be offended by messiness in communal spaces (break rooms etc.).

I always wonder about such surveys: Who was surveyed? What were the survey questions? What were the conditions of the survey?

A little research of my own discovered that a little over 2,400 people were surveyed online, of which only about 1,500 were employed. The press release containing this information indicates that those surveyed were given a list of seven pet peeves from which to choose.

It doesn't tell us how the respondents were selected, nor who determined what pet peeves should be listed as the top seven.

Apparently, one of my pet peeves is news outlets presenting unscientific survey results in a way that makes them sound very official.

Because I have serious questions about the top three workplace pet peeves being gossip, other people's poor time management, and messy break rooms, I decided to conduct a little unscientific survey of my own. I emailed 20 people from my email list (all of them employed) and asked them to identify their top two workplace pet peeves. I didn't give them a list from which they could choose, I just wanted to hear their gripes without influencing their response.

Guess what? Nothing relating to gossip showed up in their responses.

Zip....Zilch....Nada.

Only two items came close to correlating to other's poor time management skills ("unreliable co-workers" and "unproductive meetings")

Only one person mentioned messy communal spaces as a pet peeve ("people who don't clean out the company microwave or wipe off the counters").

If I had to create a category to label the most common pet peeve from my survey respondents, by far it would be "Poor Interpersonal Communication Skills." Here are some of the pet peeves from my (unscientific) survey that would relate to that category:

• Surprise confrontations during meetings
• Sending an email when one is emotionally charged
• People who leave looooooooong voice mails
• A lack of full disclosure – and also people who stretch the truth
• Lack of necessary communication
• Lack of courtesy between professionals
• People with big egos that won't shut up
• People with little egos who won't speak up — even when they should
• People who eat while on the phone
• People who assume they know your motives

My unscientific survey also had a lot of comments that could be categorized "non-collaborative efforts," or "not operating from the same page." Here are some pet peeves that would fit in such a category:

• Employees disregarding our company values
• Co-workers who are not team players
• A boss who sets a lower standard for himself than for everyone else
• Having unrealistic goals set for me by people living very far away
• Spending too much time focusing on "what went wrong" instead of learning what could be done better next time

I don't know about you, but throughout the years, most of the pet peeves people tell me about are very similar to what's listed above. Call me silly, but when 36% of a survey's respondents are unemployed, it's hard to relate their findings to the real workplace.

Do our happy parrots in the media care about that? Apparently not.

All that said, if my unscientific survey results are anywhere near accurate, it seems we could make our workplaces much better if we focus our attention on just two things:

a) improving our communication skills, and
b) getting everyone to think like a team and operate from the same page.

What a concept!