It often becomes very political in the office. This is because those involved hope for an advantage of these measures.
Few tips on how a manager can avoid office politics
Listen and look
The first step in office politics is to listen carefully and look. Only then will one be able to expose office politics as such.
It can be smaller or larger things. For instance, a D2 item store employee sends emails to everyone in the mailing list via “Reply all”. The employee sends messages in the group chat in which he/she points out unimportant errors. Most of the time, it’s about discrediting the other person and profiling yourself.
It is therefore important to listen carefully, to read, and to look. Before you say anything, you should stop and analyze the situation. In this way, troublemakers can be identified quickly.
Quickly inform employees of misconduct
As a manager, you should quickly point out the misconduct of the respective employee. You can ask the employee to come to the office and talk to him about it. In most cases, however, the clerk will pretend to be ignorant.
One should also pay attention to the reaction of the employee. Does the employee become abusive? Does he give himself offended? Does he pretend he doesn’t know anything? The response will show what type of employee you are dealing with.
Management must appear as a unit
It is also important that management appears as a unit. If the employee notices that he can push a wedge between the managers or management levels, then they will try in many cases.
However, if the employee realizes that the management is a unit, then this will quickly be abandoned, as he realizes that this will be useless.
Communicate corporate values
As a leader, you should try to pass on positive company values to your employees as well as possible. You have to make it clear to the employees that fair and respectful interaction is desired and that misconduct will be punished.
Office politics can slip your entire project and melt away any profit you could possibly make. The danger posed by office politics is too high for you, especially in smaller companies, to ignore this topic.
Better to “take out” a few productive employees than to let the majority of the employees become unusable employees through political measures.