The beasts in your office

The cringeworthy antics of TV's David Brent are entertaining to watch, but real-life workplace wrangles are often less amusing. Photo / Supplied

It's easy to laugh at the excruciating behaviour of David Brent in classic sitcom The Office, but real-life workplace wrangles are rarely so amusing.

We've all worked alongside people who annoy us - Mr 'I'm sick but too important to go home', Mrs 'Let's have a meeting before the meeting'.

Then there are the awkward moments by the watercooler when Ms "How the hell did they get their job?" wanders over to kill conversation.

Now the characters who make office life what it is - all 38 of them - have been categorised by Aussie author Michael Stanford. The 41-year-old says his book Inhuman Resources: A guide to the psychos, misfits and criminally incompetent in every office is intentionally funny.

But the laughs shouldn't mask a serious message: colleagues can make working life miserable, so we should learn how to deal with them.

"Unless you stop and look at it, you just start to accept things over time and you let people behave in ways they probably shouldn't," he says.

"Through the stories and the characters you get to see these people are real, we all know them and can identify them, and we can say, 'You know what, that person does that and it's not right'."

Stanford has worked in a wide range of workplaces and says he encountered the same personality types in every one.

He got the idea for the book 10 years ago during a video conference with an overseas client. Stanford was in the middle of the presentation when his audience suddenly got up and left.

"I was looking at an empty chair on the screen. I turned to my boss and he just looked at me and said 'keep going', in the hope that maybe he'd come back into the room."

Thus, the first character was born - the "Someone else more important has come up" person.

"There's a range of characters from the simply annoying to those that are quite toxic," says Stanford.

"It doesn't matter where you work, there is politics and there are personalities that clash and there's a lot of stress that's created by how people interact and how they deal with their workload."

Stanford says email has made things worse.

"It can also be used in a very manipulative way, where people can say something quite nasty and then add a little smiley face and think that's okay."

The recession has also increased workplace friction.

"You've had a lot of people who have been fearful, and when people are fearful they can misbehave. We all have done that. There's a degree of paranoia that can easily sneak into an office."

While most of the characters are common across workplaces and cultures, Stanford believes one may be unique to New Zealand and Australia - the ex-pat. "We've all dealt with the ex-pats who have spent some time in Hong Kong or wherever," he says, "and they have that 'I've worked in those countries therefore I'm slightly superior' thing."

Aucklander Allison Mooney has also written a book on workplace personality types.

Pressing the Right Buttons pinpoints four characters, "the playful", "the powerful", "the precise" and "the peaceful".

"I always say we hire great talent, only to find that once we've hired them they can't work with each other," said Mooney. "Often we only view our world from our perspective. It's about respecting people's differences."

Auckland organisational psychologist Neisha Voot agrees emails have added a whole new dimension to office politics.

"It's open to miscommunication because so much communication is through body language and tone.

"As soon as you remove those, you leave the other party able to add their own assumptions based on their previous experience with you."

Voot refers to this month's Employment Relations Authority ruling which found a woman was unjustifiably dismissed for sending angry emails.

"Just because she'd put something in red and there were capitals, there was tone insinuated from that," says Voot.

But not all problems are about aggression. Voot says a particularly Kiwi attribute that causes tension in the workplace is our tendency to avoid conflict at all costs.

"It's that whole stoic, 'don't say anything unless you have to' thing. That's one thing as New Zealanders we need to work on, especially as we're integrating other cultures into the workplace."