It’s hard to come up with a concise definition of respect in the workplace. That doesn’t mean it’s any less important and you deserve to find a workplace that respects its employees while actually doing the work to encourage respect.
While it’s a privilege to choose your job and find one that does more than pay the bills, it’s also incredibly important to your mental health and physical health.
When you’re respected in the workplace, you can prioritize your professional goals, treat others with the respect they deserve, and get access to people who want to see you grow. Look for these 15 steps to create respect in the workplace.
This post is all about respect in the workplace definition.
RESPECT IN THE WORKPLACE:
1. Your supervisor and coworkers demonstrate emotional intelligence
When you work with adults, you can expect them to regulate their emotions. Unfortunately, people don’t learn about emotional intelligence. So, people don’t realize that they need to put specific effort into learning to understand their emotions and the emotions of others.
A healthy work environment will allow you to focus on your responsibilities without working around or managing someone else’s emotions for them.
This can look like doing extra work because your coworker has a history of rejecting your feedback when the two of you need to collaborate on a project.
2. You respect people regardless of cultural background
You deserve to feel comfortable in your workplace, and so do your coworkers. Regardless of your identity or the identity of your coworkers, you always have the right to feel respected by others.
You may not understand people from different backgrounds or who have different perspectives. That doesn’t change the fact that you and your coworkers owe it to each other to create a respectful work environment.
This means finding ways to respect different opinions, so long as those opinions don’t infringe on someone’s right to feel comfortable in the workspace.
3. You don’t feel threatened by nonverbal communication
Sometimes the scariest interactions with other people come from the stuff they don’t say. In a healthy workplace, you provide positive feedback and constructive criticism without any hidden messages.
Ideally, you get this in return due to a positive work culture of mutual respect. However, when that’s not the case because someone doesn’t like your feedback or doesn’t value you as a coworker, it’s hard to work with them.
You can’t be honest because you’re afraid they’ll lash out in some unspoken way that is also not something you can report because they haven’t voiced it.
4. You can maintain a work-life balance without losing job opportunities
There’s no worse feeling than wanting to spend time with your family or partner and feeling like you can’t leave work. When you struggle with a work-life balance, it usually comes from your supervisor and their approach to leadership.
The more a leader makes their employees feel like they have to compete, the more that leader thinks they’ll get hard work out of their employees. But, all it does is create an atmosphere of stress and toxicity.
So, remember that, if you’re struggling to balance work and life, you should be able to ask for support from your supervisor. If you can’t, that might mean it’s time to find a job where you are respected.
5. You and your coworkers care about each other on an individual basis
The only way that you and your coworkers can truly care for each other as people is if you work in a safe environment. Of course, you can bond with someone over how toxic upper management is, but, realistically, meaningful relationships come from feeling safe in the workplace.
When you feel more like team members than competitors, you feel the benefits of a respectful workplace as a safe space. Not only do you develop friendships that can broaden your professional network, but you also enjoy work more because you have friends there.
6. Your supervisor shows interest in people’s ideas
The most important leadership behavior is collaboration. You want to see your supervisor collaborating with their employees and asking for ideas. As cliché as it sounds, the best leader knows they need help.
Part of that is bringing in new ideas and, the most important part, crediting the person whose idea they’re using. If they listen to your ideas and they use them, they need to reference you and give you the credit you deserve.
Sometimes, you can find ways to prove they took your ideas unfairly, but, usually, you have no ground to stand as the employee. Watch out for people stealing your intellectual property because you deserve a supervisor who proves that they see your value.
7. You and your coworkers treat each other like human beings
The easiest way to tell if a workplace has a culture of respect is to look at the relationships between employees. Yes, they should treat each other like teammates and it’s also important to look for workplace friendships.
But, it’s okay if people leave the workplace and never see each other. The problem arises when employees treat each other in a respectful manner and it’s all surface-level.
They may say good morning and ask how you’re doing, but they don’t really care if you’re gone and they’d happily take an opportunity from you if it arose.
8. Your supervisor shows that they trust you with flexible rules
The supervisor can set the tone for the workplace. They can either stress people out with lots of stressful rules, which usually leads to high rates of employee turnover.
Or they can opt to trust their employees to follow company policies, which usually leads to higher employee satisfaction. However, this does mean that team leaders are not responsible for disciplinary action when an employee makes another person feel unwelcome.
.There’s only so much you can do to keep someone from hurting another person with bigotry, sexism, or a hostile personality. But, supervisors can make sure that the person hurt is the person supported and made to feel like they’re part of the workplace community.
9. You value your leadership team and feel supported by them
There’s no better feeling than working for a supervisor who puts effort into workplace respect. While there isn’t a way to prevent discrimination, bigotry, or bullying, it can go a long way for your supervisor to set the precedent for the importance of respect.
This means that they show how much they value the respectful treatment of all employees by practicing open communication, modeling emotional regulation, and providing employees with leadership opportunities.
This can look like asking an employee to take the lead on a project they’re prepared to lead or talking about the ways they want to improve as a leader.
10. You can reach your full potential at this job
Whether your current job is a stepping stone, your dream job, or just something to pay the bills, you can still find fulfillment in it. This means that you feel valued and your supervisor notices your skills.
It’s especially important for your supervisor to notice when you have become more skilled at your job and can therefore, with compensation and credit, take on a different workload.
In other words, look for ways to challenge yourself at your job and identify the moments when your supervisor treats you as a capable professional in a professional workplace.
Look for the moments when your supervisor trusts you and communicates that trust while supporting you as you try something new.
11. You’re allowed to make mistakes and given the support to learn from them
For your workplace to have a respectful environment, you need to feel like you can fail. This means that you need resources in place to fail efficiently.
When you fail efficiently, you learn what mistake you made, you are respected regardless of your mistake, and you are encouraged to continue making mistakes as a way to continue learning and improving.
As much as we don’t want to fail, that’s the only way to truly learn and you need an atmosphere of respect to make that happen. Any job that discourages you from trying new things and growing as a professional is a job that is holding you back.
12. Your supervisor and coworkers demonstrate active listening skills
You are not responsible for teaching your coworkers how to be respectful and professional. This means that when your coworkers are not using healthy communication methods, it’s not your responsibility to teach them what healthy communication looks like.
Having said that, it’s important to know what to look for when you want a workplace that values true respect and employees’ needs.
Observe human interaction when you’re at work and notice body language. Ask yourself if people maintain eye contact, face the person talking, and nod along. These are all signs they want the person to feel heard and valued.
13. You have a culture of open communication with coworkers
There’s no substitute for open communication. Unfortunately, if people don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves and providing respectful but honest feedback, there’s a lack of respect in the workplace.
Respect gives people the space to criticize someone’s work and do so without making that person feel belittled. This starts with great leaders who model open communication by providing as much negative feedback as they ask for.
Employees need to feel comfortable with providing their supervisor with an honest look at their leadership style.
14. You can accept and provide constructive criticism
Everyone needs to accept and provide feedback with the common goal of growing as professionals and as a company. This is essential to a more positive work environment where everyone has high job satisfaction because they’re valued and see room for professional growth.
Look for workplaces that promote core values aligned with your own because these are typically the places that have satisfied employees who feel represented by management.
15. You’re allowed to call out disrespectful behavior
When you think of criticism in the workplace, be sure to also think of it in relation to interactions with your coworkers. As terrifying as it is, you need to feel comfortable calling someone out for their behavior when you think it’s disrespectful.
If you don’t, your mental health will likely suffer and that discomfort will be worse than voicing it at work. When you call someone out, it doesn’t have to be confrontational or “aggressive.”
It can be as simple as making a statement and setting a boundary about they can interact with you like, “Jack, if you call me ‘babe’ in the future, I won’t respond. It makes me uncomfortable and I don’t want to feel uncomfortable in my workplace.”
