TotalJobs Data Visualization: “Good working relationships can take months to build… but they can go wrong in a moment. Sadly, it seems most of us will experience this. 62% of the 7,076 workers surveyed by Totaljobs admitted to having a work enemy According to a Totaljobs survey of over 7,000 UK workers, 6 in 10 admitted they have at least one ‘work enemy’. For some, it’s an annoying colleague who is always getting on your nerves. But for others, it can be more serious, like an office bully causing much deeper damage. In The World of Work Spouses, Totaljobs discovered that only 2 in 10 UK workers have a close workplace friendship. That means we’re three times more likely to develop a rift with a colleague than a bond. Boys will be (annoyed by) boys. Girls will be (annoyed by) girls. Your work enemy is likely to be the same gender as you. Maybe familiarity breeds contempt. Or perhaps competitiveness and authority are the key factors in what make us fall out with a colleague. Either way, the relationships we have with our managers seem vulnerable to problems. We’re less likely to make enemies with someone who’s younger than us or lower on the company ladder. Either way, we probably have to deal with them every day. If you’re reading this at work, your work enemy is quite likely to be within sight right now. 85% say the relationship started out well… then things went wrong Interestingly, almost all rifts begin with a relationship that once worked. This suggests we know that a successful collaboration is possible. But before we can fix it, we need to figure out what went wrong…”