Avoiding Road Rage at Work

Do you ever get road rage? Boy, I used to get it and get it bad.

It confused me, too. I was normally a calm and rational person. Yelling and slamming my steering wheel in a futile attempt to change something was counter to my usual behavior and beliefs.

That was until I learned the causes of road rage. The reason that so many of us reasonable people turn into balls of rage is that the conditions create a perfect cocktail of frustration.

They are:

1 — Time pressure

If we weren’t in a rush, delays wouldn’t be frustrating. However, if you’re in a car that means you need to be somewhere relatively soon. We don’t want to miss our event, make a friend wait, get to bed on time, etc. Social pressure is a powerful thing.

2 — You can’t quit

Sometimes when something is frustrating, you can end the frustration by quitting. If you’ve played video games for long enough, you’ve definitely rage-quitted something. Same for traffic, if you can “quit” the traffic by turning out of it, it’s fine. If you’re stuck? Then say hello to some swelling frustration.

3 — You can’t control it

If you could do something to make the cars ahead of you move, you could manage your frustration. However, we’re powerless to make the cars accelerate or part ways like Moses at the Dead Sea. That lack of agency is infuriating, too. Indeed, our inability to control outcomes is one of the major frustrations of life.

4 — You can’t communicate

If you were stuck in an elevator with other people, there are a lot of ways to use communication and teamwork to get out of the situation. That might be scary, but not frustrating. There’s no real way to use communication or teamwork to solve traffic. In fact, the only ways we can communicate are usually aggressive and fuel the fire. Honking horns, tailgating, hand-gesturing, etc. When we can’t voice our frustration, or collaborate to end it — we end up getting more frustrated.

So what does this have to do with the workplace? It turns out these factors are present in almost every workplace, as well. Think about it.

1 — Deadlines create time pressure

You have to create quality work on a deadline. The fear of letting down a customer, your coworkers, and yourself puts a lot of pressure to go fast. Anything that impedes speed is frustrating but there are endless speed bumps at work. Distractions, complications, office politics, waiting on others, etc.

2 — Huge costs to quitting

Of course, you’re free to quit your job whenever you like, but it’s not that easy. We are all familiar with the costs of quitting. Loss of income, harmed reputation, the stress of finding a new job, etc. So that’s not an option most of the time.

3 — Lack of control over outcomes or process

This is the most frustrating thing, right? There’s a lot at stake, but try as we might we only control some of the outcome (there are too many factors) and sometimes only part of the inputs, and maybe not even the process. Yet, we are held accountable for the results. Being told what to do, how to do it, and what you did wrong is well, very frustrating.

4 — Inability to communicate frustrations

“Feedback, communication, transparency”, buzzwords that a lot of companies love to advertise on their culture page, job descriptions, and onboarding processes, but don’t always do a good job of actually promoting.

Employees are often afraid to voice their concerns or complaints. It makes them look bad or may make others look bad. It’s not good for your working relationships. However, it is good for the rest of the team and the company at large if there is an institutionalized way to give honest feedback.

All of this adds up to a lot of frustration at work. We all feel it. The problem is this frustration leads to all sorts of issues that impact individuals, and inevitably teams and the entire organization.

How might we remove some of these frustrations? Here are some ideas.

1 — Flexible deadlines

Look, I get it — time is money, and efficiency is often what firms are hired for in the first place. Deadlines put everyone on the same page and allow for planning. They are necessary evils.

Yet, how often are deadlines truly met in any case? In how many situations would the client prefer quality over quickness? Is the need for speed causing other negative externalities like stress, neglect for other tasks, and more? Probably. Adopting a softer stance on deadlines (which is an aggressive word in the first place) would help remove time pressure and thus frustration.

2 — Add agency to employees lives

It’s a harsh truth of life that we have to accept that we only have so much control over the outcomes of any endeavor. Reinforcing that idea is one way to ease some pressure. Don’t stress so much about the outcomes, focus on the inputs to increase the odds of a good outcome.

Speaking of inputs, give employees more control over the process. Having ownership over how the work is done is motivating because now you a) don’t have an excuse for why you didn’t like it or didn’t perform and b) can take more credit for any positive outcomes.

3 — Foster open communication

As I alluded to above, communication and teamwork are skills that every employer seeks and promotes, but too often only with lip-service.

In Google’s famous 2 year study on effective teams, the major takeaway was that “psychological safety” was key to performance. You have to create structures where people feel free to communicate honestly without fear of punishment for their remarks. It could be anonymous, there could be designated meetings where feedback is encouraged and acted upon, exec-team AMAs, whatever. It just has to be more than a bullet on the onboarding packet.

When people feel heard, that their concerns are being listened to, and are involved in creating solutions to problems, frustration goes way, way down.

4 — Avoid traffic in the first place through rules/frameworks

There’s one obvious solution I haven’t mentioned yet, avoid traffic in the first place! Traffic is caused by poorly designed roadways and driver behavior. (Fun fact: did you know that traffic is mostly caused by over-braking? If everyone kept the distance between the cars in front of and behind them the same and reasonably far apart, there’d be far less traffic. Try it out!) Extending the metaphor, companies create traffic with poorly designed systems and employee behavior.

There are a lot of ways that company policies and culture can incentivize the behaviors that cause frustration for everyone. Hyper-competitive attitudes, HiPPO decision making, inflexible processes, etc. Organizations should take a step back to evaluate how they might be creating traffic and go about fixing it for the good of all.

[Bonus: You’ll have noticed that I didn’t mention quitting. I still don’t advise quitting. But there may be a way for organizations to allow employees to switch projects with more fluidity to find their fit so that you can “quit” in a sense, but not in a life-altering way. I know all the complications that that presents, so I didn’t want to suggest that as a serious tactic.]

Frustration at work seems like a natural byproduct of the pressures of doing good business in a competitive environment. Yet I believe that it doesn’t have to be that way. We know what causes frustration and we now know that those causes aren’t necessary for good business. In fact, that frustration leads to turnover, loss of productivity, and more. So, let’s avoid road rage at work with some straightforward solutions.