Bad manners tips UK workers over the edge
Published January 18, 2008 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Office Products
Unreliable equipment. Deadlines. Colleagues. The office can be a very stressful place. But what really makes our blood boil is bad manners.
‘Being spoken down to’ was identified as a cause of office rage by two thirds (68%) of UK office workers in a pan-European survey commissioned by Canon, closely followed by office politics (58%). The number one irritant across Europe as a whole was long and pointless meetings.
Other major irritants are unnecessary admin, which takes up two hours of every day for 40% of office workers; PC downtime (24%); and people leaving paper jams in printers for others to fix (24%).
Commenting on the findings, psychotherapist and occupational stress expert Lucy Beresford said: “For people to feel less stressed in the office, they need to feel more in control of their working life and working environment. When this control is lost through external events such as a rude boss, sitting in a pointless meeting or a printer jam that no one wants to fix, it doesn’t take much for the average office worker to snap. There is no doubt that office rage is on the increase, but a range of initiatives such as crisper meetings or interpersonal kindness could reduce stress levels.”
The survey appears to reinforce national stereotypes, with Italian office workers being the most likely to blow their top (94% of Italian workers have witnessed a colleague losing control), and UK office workers most likely to express their frustrations in anti-social behaviour such as kicking or breaking office equipment (19%).
Supporting the arguments of office designers and furniture manufacturers as well as recent research by HP (see above), Canon’s survey suggests that the physical layout of offices can have a significant effect on office rage: 57% of respondents felt that the look of their office increased stress levels, with 17% saying it increased stress ‘significantly’.
