Six Steps to Managing a Negative Work Environment
Written by on July 8, 2023
Six Steps to Managing a Negative Work Environment Does your work environment bring out the best in you or the worst? When you leave work, do you feel drained, exhausted and even angry? Do you generally feel like you are dodging bullets all day? It happened to me the other day. As a practicing RN, I take shifts at a local, acute care psychiatric hospital. So one day, I work with Nurse Mattie, we’ll call her. We don’t usually work together. But from the moment the shift began during morning report, she complains, making little comments about how she hates this and, “why did they accept this patient?
I hate this place. Oh that person is horrible. I hate her.” You know the type… I do not get sucked in. I stay away as best I can and focus on my work – I’m there to do a job, make a difference and make some money, right? So I focus on that. I make small positive comments that support the people she is verbally bashing – I do not gossip but rather look for the good in others and offer that as a possibility to someone so skilled at seeing the negative in everything.
I carry an invisible shield that protects me from her “spears of anger and arrows of hate”. But perhaps, I do not say enough to get her to stop or to notice how she is behaving. By the end of the day, I find myself angry. Very angry. It took some time – lots of deep breaths – and some mental processing to realize that, after being bombarded for eight hours with her moaning, groaning and complaining, it got to me.
My shield did not sustain the beating. While I was able to recuperate fairly quickly, it was easy to see how this could eat a person alive if it happened everyday. Little by little, the goodness in you would be zapped. And you would turn into an angry, unhappy, stressed out person who either succumbs to it by doing/saying nothing and letting it eat you away inside, or you become like her noticing the negative in everything too. Working in a negative environment offers you the opportunity to develop your leadership muscles forcing you to be more assertive about how others can communicate in your presence, expressing directly what is acceptable behavior and what you will tolerate vs.
what you will not tolerate. Here are 6 steps to help you when working in a negative environment: 1. If you beloved this information and also you desire to acquire details relating to kierowca ce denmark i implore you to visit our own website. Strengthen your “shield”. Nothing is personal. No matter what other people do, it’s not about you. You may have an emotional reaction to what someone does, but control your emotions. Use the emotion as information and choose your response appropriately. 2. Develop your self-control. Manage your emotions and use the information to speak up or to change yourself in some way.