7 Things Makes You Look Downright Unprofessional

You’ve had the same job for 7 years straight. Congratulations! Not everyone manages to hold down a good job for such a long time. Your office has probably become a second home to you now, with a ton of close coworkers and a relaxing atmosphere.

But have you begun to treat your office too causally unbeknownst to you? When you settle in one place and put down deep roots, you tend to lose some of your earlier professionalism. There’s no shame in doing so since it happens to the best of employees everywhere.

Lucky for you, these unhealthy habits are quite easy to get rid of, when you spot them fast. Read on to see whether you’ve picked up any of these routines that might harm your future at your job or your career advancement opportunities.

Always being late for work

When you first started your job, you probably turned up at work 30 minutes earlier. But with time, you’ve picked up a habit of running in late with only seconds to spare before the clock starts ticking. In a worse case, you waltz in 15 minutes after everyone else has already started work mumbling your usual excuse of “bad traffic”. Everyone can run late to work occasionally but if you’ve made a habit of it, it’s highly unprofessional. You can make a few slight changes to your morning routine or keep your alarm half an hour early to be punctual for work.

Complaining about work with coworkers

We’ve all struggled to deal with a too heavy workload at some point in our careers. When water seems to be rising above your neck, the urge to complain about it all with a listening coworker can be overwhelming. If your workload is too hard for you to bear, you’d be stressed out and on the verge of a breakdown on most days. But complaining about it all with a coworker instead of your manager would bring you negative results. Not only can your coworker do anything about the problem at hand but also, they can talk about it with another person at work. In the end, your manager might hear about it from a person from a totally different department, leaving you both in an awkward situation.

Loving the sound of your voice over others’

True, you might have tons of great ideas to share on the group project. You may also be the most senior team member. But if you don’t let the others on your team share their ideas or opinions, you may seem like a horrible team player. Try to let others finish their narrations before you ask for clarification or add something to their ideas. Good talkers are aplenty, but good listeners are rare to come by. Show your professionalism by listening to your team members.

Handling the office grapevine

If you’ve stayed in one place for a long time, you’d have years of gossip piled up in your drawers. It could be tempting to share the juicy details of the latest office drama with your coworkers or dissect the relationship status of the new guy from IT, but these topics can easily turn ugly. Instead of spreading negative gossip around the workplace, try to steer lunchtime conversations away from those areas to safer waters.

Under-delivering work

Don’t promise to send in a 5-page report the next day if you already know that you’ll need a full day to go through all the data. You would definitely get behind on schedule with your tasks and make yourself seem unprofessional. Always try to be realistic when you promise handover dates to your boss.

Completely forgetting to do the little things

You may be an A+ worker who gets all the big projects done on time, but if you put off the small tasks as insignificant, you might have a problem. It will take you a few minutes of your day to sort through your emails and write a reply to the senders’ concerns. But since it seems unimportant at first glance, you may keep putting it off. At the end of the month, you’d be left with 500 unread emails in your inbox and 30 little memos in your desk drawer that you totally forgot about.

Letting yourself go completely at office events

Just because the office Christmas party has an open bar, it doesn’t mean that you must booze up with 5 glasses. Office events are usually organized to give everyone a chance to unwind a little and celebrate with their coworkers. You don’t want to end up drunk and pass out one hour into the party. Enjoy yourself at office parties and make them a chance for networking with the people in the company.