Dealing With Lazy Coworkers

Workplace Leadership

- Thejendra Sreenivas

Do you work in an office? Do you have slimy coworkers who take one-hour lunch breaks, ten coffee breaks, spend time on personal calls, never complete any work on time, and other personal activities during office hours? And you end up doing their work or waiting for them to complete their work for you to start yours? You are not alone. Millions of productive employees are stuck with bad coworkers who don’t have any workplace discipline to complete their responsibilities on time. Often, they will be elderly or senior employees who now think they are entitled to be lazy because they have been productive in the past.

Simply grumbling won’t help - You need innovative methods to get them on track. Or, your productivity and contribution will nosedive. For example, if a senior manager has to read a short report and approve some simple expenses for you to start your work then you will be wasting one week without doing anything productive. Here are a few tips to handle such workers.

Don’t let them distract you - Don’t waste time watching what they are doing or not doing. Focus on your current and pending activities. Send periodic status reports about your contributions to your manager. This can kickstart a status report expectation by the manager and everyone will be forced to document what they did in the week. Then lazy employees will not be able to hide as they will have to show evidence of what they have done and how fast it was done.