How to Get Your Annoying Co-worker to Leave You Alone
3.Alert the appropriate authorities.
If strategies No. 1 and No. 2, on top of any number of dirty looks and eye-rolls, don’t do the trick, it’s probably time to talk to HR and/or your boss. If you do end up going that route, try to have some sort of documentation that shows just how disruptive your annoying co-worker is being. “Suppose that [Pam] could document the number of minutes, so she could show that in one week he had stopped by her desk 40 times, costing her 200 minutes,” says Sutton. When you frame your issue in terms of a disruption to productivity, and you have some kind of evidence, your boss or HR department is much likelier to take the issue seriously.
If you do make a complaint, and you have any allies from your initial gossip search, see if they’d be willing to stand behind you. “To the extent you can document [the behavior], and have a posse of other people to back you up, that’s the situation where people tend to be the most successful in going to an authority figure,” says Sutton.
