Dutch employees regularly find the habits of their colleagues disturbing. The annoying habits at first seem harmless, but can form a serious obstacle to cooperation and working atmosphere in organizations. For example, employees regularly receive important information late, are interrupted in meetings, or have to clean up a colleague's "mess". This is apparent from a study by Sharp among 504 Dutch office employees.
The survey reveals the most common bad habits in the office:colleagues who leave printed documents in the printer (52.60%), fail to restock the printer paper (51.20%), interrupt each other during meetings (47.60%) share important information (42.90%) and work on a laptop or phone during meetings (40.30%)
It is striking that in most cases office employees do not address each other personally about disruptive behaviour. In some cases, 15.70% of the office workers surveyed start a conversation with a colleague. More often, employees choose to address their colleague in an indirect way. For example, by emailing a colleague about the behavior of the 'annoying' colleague (29.40%), placing a note with a complaint in the general area (15.30%), ignoring the colleague's behavior (15, 10%), send an email to the general company email address (9.90%), sigh or moan (8.70%), or send an email to the boss to talk about the colleague to complain (8.50%).
