Don’t bitch about your colleagues, but do joke around in meetings.
Avoid open offices like the plague.
There's such a long list of the terrible things that come with working in an open office it's hard to know where to begin. There are more interruptions, you feel more stressed, it's harder to concentrate (one study found that background office noise impaired participants ability to do mental arithmetic), there are fewer opportunities for private conversations, and people take more sick days – all adding up to you not getting as much done as you'd like.
"The open-plan proponents' argument that open-plan improves morale and productivity appears to have no basis in the research literature," write the authors of a paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
For many people who work in an open office there's probably no way to get around this easily. But if you can carve out some peace and privacy in a quiet corner, even just for an afternoon, your work will thank you for it.
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Actually, just stay at home.
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, conducted an experiment at CTrip, a Chinese travel agency, where call-centre workers who volunteered to work from home were randomly assigned to working in the office or from home for nine months. The work was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics this year.
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Bloom told the Harvard Business Review:
We found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.
Become actual friends with your colleagues.
According to Ron Friedman, social psychologist and author of The Best Place To Work, having a work best friend actually increases productivity.
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