Making friends at work is important. Work can be stress-free, productive, and sometimes even fun with good people around you! But having coworkers you can’t trust or who don’t respect you can affect your productivity, overall health, and happiness at the place of your employment.
If your coworkers in a company aren’t trustworthy, it can lead to hostility in the workplace, cause confrontations between colleagues, and lower your faith in the company as a whole. It is crucial to have the skills to identify and recognize the signs of untrustworthiness in coworkers.
Gossiping
Some gossiping between friends and friendly coworkers is normal and fine, but if you have someone at work who is overly concerned with gossiping, they shouldn’t be trusted. If your coworker loves sharing and dishing out gossip about someone else about you, they are likely doing the same with someone else about you.
It is best not to indulge in gossip with them. You should try not to associate with anyone who seems overly gossipy, and if they try to gossip with you, it is best to avoid and defuse the situation.
Transactional Favoring
You might notice an employee practicing transactional favoring or sucking up to certain co-workers in the hope of gaining advantages and advancing in the workplace. Having a good relationship with your boss is crucial in the workplace.
If someone constantly tries to impress or win favors from management instead of putting in work to reach team goals, they are waving a huge red flag of being untrustworthy. This is especially true if they don’t hesitate to throw their coworkers under the bus or someone who always tries to one-up their coworkers.
Past Untrustworthiness
If you have a coworker who has a history of being unkind to a past coworker or who has shown ill intent to colleagues in the past, it is highly likely they still aren’t trustworthy. Even though the past is the past, and people do change, it is better to avoid them if you haven’t seen any signs of change or betterment.
They Don’t Accept Responsibility
People who never take the blame and accept responsibility are clear indicators that you should not trust them. Watch out for the colleagues who pass the blame on to anyone but themselves.
People who always have excuses for their performances and always have a scapegoat for why they couldn’t achieve what they set out to achieve are some of the worst colleagues to have and should be avoided whenever possible.
They Steal Your Ideas
A colleague who you might have shared an idea with, who then moved on and passed your ideas as their own, is a colleague who is untrustworthy and dishonest. The ideal workplace would be where stealing ideas should never be a concern. But with coworkers like these, it is best to keep your ideas to yourself or speak to them directly in front of multiple people at the office.
