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Remember the last time your coworker microwaved fish? We all get annoyed at work. But what office situation is *the* worst of all? That’s exactly what we found out.
You open the office fridge. Grab your Tupperware... but someone ate half your casserole. You throw it in the microwave only to realize the interior looks like a scene of a crime. You want to grab a plate, but they’re all stacked dirty in the sink. You slowly lose your appetite and opt for coffee. But the coffee pot’s empty.
No matter how much we love our jobs, all offices come with people, habits, and situations that drive us nuts.
Inspired by hilariously “relatable” Tweets and stories about office pet peeves, we set out to find the worst ones.
We surveyed 1,026 Americans and asked them about:
We can proudly say we’ve scientifically identified The Worst Office Offenders.
Before we did the actual study, we turned to Twitter, read dozens of articles about what steams Americans up in their offices, and asked our peers about their pet peeves.
First, we curated a list of 120+ office situations that grind gears.
Then, we narrowed those down to include only 28: the ones that just seemed way worse than others.
Before we tell you which one turned out to be the most horrendous, here’s a shortlist we came up with. In no particular order.
(From your personal experience—which of those make you fume?)
For each example of an annoying office situation, we asked our respondents just two questions:
We then came up with a tilt factor: we multiplied perceived annoyance level with reported frequency. Our assumption was that for something to really take the joy out of our work lives it has to happen fairly often AND be nothing short of infuriating.
Here it is. A list of America’s proud top 10 worst office offenders.
So—
What can we learn from the list above?
Most definitely, we can divide the worst office pet peeves into four main categories:
And it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Ultimately, what annoys us most are the things that make it hard to keep up a good level of our own work.
We’re unlikely to perform well if:
Also, let’s pause for a second to discuss *the* worst entry from our list.
Coworkers coming to work sick.
Can we please all take a vow to never, ever do it?
If you come in sick, you’re spreading your germs amongst:
Eventually, the snowball effect kicks in and everyone’s work performance and personal life suffer.
Feeling sick? Take a day off. Can’t do it? Work from home. Really. Simple as this.
Alright—
So you’ve seen the list of the most annoying AND common office pet peeves.
But—
Let’s see what happens if we remove the frequency factor.
Here’s a list of America’s most annoying office situations regardless of how often they happen (see new entries in RED).
What do the three new items on the list tell us?
In short, while situations like not having enough parking space, other people smelling bad, or coworkers using your personal items all get on our nerves, luckily, they don’t happen too often.
We found no major differences in what gets on men and women’s nerves across US offices. But—
There’s one clear trend. Men reported higher levels of annoyance for 25 out of 28 office pet peeves we analyzed.
The only outliers?
Why’s that?
Most likely, because women are more concerned than men about their health and overall office hygiene.
The general trend we found is: the older you are, the less angry you get.
Gen Z and Millennials reported higher annoyance levels than Gen X and Baby Boomers for a staggering 26 out of 28 office pet peeves in question.
Apart from these two:
It seems that younger generations are so used to the omnipresent social media that they barely notice their coworkers rummaging through their smartphones every day.
Also, surprise, surprise, older generations seem more concerned about their health and well-being (YOLO, right?).
Now that you know what Americans are most annoyed by, let’s see what “pet peeves” aren’t as bad as they seem.
Here’s a list of the 10 least irritating office situations asked about in our study.
At the end of our survey, we included one open-ended question: just in case we forgot to include something really important on our list.
And—
It seems like we did.
Most answers to our additional “what else annoys you” question, concerned three issues.
(See some sample answers below.)
Some specific-yet-relatable ones:
Some… well, just weirdly specific:
Some plain depressing:
And, last but not least:
It is.
For this study, we collected answers from 1,026 American respondents via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Respondents consisted of 54% females and 46% males. 7% of respondents were 23 or younger, 62% aged 24–39, 22% aged 40–55, and 9% 56 or older.
This self-report study investigated office situations American employees find annoying. Respondents were asked 56 scale-based questions regarding the perceived frequency of a given annoying situation as well as perceived annoyance level caused by it.
As experience is subjective, we understand that some participants and their answers might be affected by recency, attribution, exaggeration, self-selection, non-response or voluntary response bias.
Given the gender and age makeup of our large sample, the study can be generalized to the entire population.
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