Comprehensive research has uncovered the best thing you can do in the workplace to maintain your sanity: Lock up your lunch.
LinkedIn asked 17,000 workers worldwide what drives them up their cubicle walls.
Top 5 pet peeves worldwide:
- People not taking ownership for their actions
- Constant complainers
- Dirty common areas
- Starting meetings late or running long, and
- Co-workers not responding to emails.
In the United States, however, the No. 1 pet peeve is people who take food out of the office fridge that isn’t theirs.
Coming in not far behind: Clothing that’s too revealing for the workplace. Although, as you may have suspected, far fewer men had a problem with this than women.
What’s burrowing under the skin of your international colleagues:
- Brazilians are more annoyed than any other nationality by excessive gossiping.
- Germans are annoyed by dirty common areas (the microwave or refrigerator in the breakroom) more than the rest of the world.
- Indians react more negatively to irritating/loud ringtones, and
- Japanese harbor more dislike for office pranks than others.
Before irritants like these hurt office productivity and relationships in the office, author and LinkedIn’s Connection Director, Nicole Williams, offers four pieces of advice for tackling pet peeves on The LinkedIn Blog here.
Some of the other pet peeves listed:
- Loud typing
- Smelly lunches
- Not putting things in the office kitchen/pantry back where they belong
- Too much perfume
- Starting meetings late or having them run long
- People who send too many unimportant e-mails, and
- Not filling an empty printer with paper.
