Once you’ve graduated from college or university, you’d be looking for a good job to start your career. To some, this might sound like a great opportunity to finally get on their feet and start making their own bread. To others, this might be a worrisome moment of transition from being a student who has no real responsibilities to being an employee whose mistakes and flaws will have major consequences in the workplace.
If you are lucky, you’ll end up in a friendly and welcoming team that will help you navigate through the first months of your career journey. If you are not so lucky, you might get exposed to some of the major workplace challenges that are inherently related to the social behavior of your colleagues. What are those? Let’s see.
Interpersonal conflicts
These can happen everywhere, not just at the workplace, and you need to be ready for that. You’ve probably read some essay examples that discuss different types of interpersonal conflicts that occur in different environments. What you might’ve learned from these social issues essay examples is that they occur for a wide variety of reasons: personal incompatibility, work-related conflicts, failure to communicate, and more. Sometimes, the conflicts just occur, and the goal here is to manage those conflicts and not let them compromise the work process.
Bullying
If you thought bullying was a problem only a kid or a student needs to worry about, unfortunately, you are wrong. Bullying can occur even in the professional environment occupied by adult people who should’ve been far past such petty things. In fact, there’s a tendency for bullying, which causes a lot of problems at work. Senior professionals would sometimes pick on the new colleagues. The mechanism behind such behavior is the same as with school kids – bullies are not satisfied with themselves and try to feel power and strength by harassing others.
Low motivation and job satisfaction
This one is a huge problem across the board; many people just don’t feel satisfied with their work. They feel like they are not paid enough, they feel like their job is useless, they feel like they are not realizing their full potential, they feel stressed because of the deadlines, and so on and on. All of these are real problems that trouble millions of people around the world, and the problem is, you can solve these by taking a risky path of changing your career. Many people are scared of doing that because they feel like they might lose their only source of income and who knows if they are going to get another one.
Gossip
Gossip is the bread and butter of any social group, and the work environment is no exception. People love good gossip but nobody wants to be the subject of those gossips. Either way, gossips can result in some issues in work, ruin your relationships with people, spread bias towards certain colleagues, and just ruin your day in general. Gossips are counterproductive, and even if you love gossiping, you should abstain gossiping your time at work to be pleasant and productive. There’s no need to spread information that might harm some people, so don’t do that.
Employment Discrimination
Discrimination is still a huge problem across all fields, including education and professional life. People tend to have preconceived biases towards each other, and that might affect your life in a negative way. Be you white, black, straight, gay, man or woman, people are going to make their assumptions about you the moment they lay their eyes on you. The way you speak, the way you dress, the way you interact with people – all of that will be analyzed by people around you.
Of course, that is totally normal to have opinions on people around you – you’ve got to know who you can trust, who your friends are, who to rely on, and whom to stay clear of. However, what you must not do is judge people before you know them. Just looking at a person once is not enough to see who they really are, and it often happens that we discriminate people by their looks and treat them unfairly because they are different. That is not a productive way to communicate with people, and you don’t want such attitudes in your workplace.
Conclusion
Entering a new social group, especially the one where you have an obligation to work with different people regardless of whether you like it or not, might be a stressful experience. Hopefully, this essay prepares you for some of the challenges. You will certainly have to deal with some of those issues at your workplace at some point, so you better be ready and toughen up a bit.
