Establish and maintain working relationships
Overview
This standard covers establishing and maintaining working relationships and working effectively with other people. This includes communicating clearly, co-operating with others and helping to improve ways of working together.
This could be with your colleagues, supervisors or managers or people external to your team, department or organisation, including suppliers and customers. It may include working with volunteers, trainees, people on secondment or work experience. It could involve working with people from different backgrounds and cultures, people with disabilities or health issues or those whose first language is not the same as your own.
This standard is suitable for all those who need to establish and maintain working relationships as part of their work role.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
- present a professional image of yourself and those you represent
- identify people within the working relationship
- be aware of the role, responsibilities, constraints and limitations of the people you are working with
- build relationships that support your work
- establish ways of working and communicating
- communicate in a way that supports productive working relationships and facilitates understanding
- be aware of non-verbal communication messages
- adapt your communication so that it can be understood by the different people you are working with
- agree and record actions from meetings in line with organisational procedures
- maintain confidentiality and protect intellectual property rights
- work co-operatively with others to achieve results, adapting your role and behaviour accordingly
- accept that other people will have different views and expectations to you and maintain respect for them
- treat people as individuals and not according to expectations or stereotypes
- deal proactively with things that go wrong with the relationship
- evaluate your contribution to the working relationship, how well you co-operated with others and how you could improve in the future
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
- the appropriate professional codes of conduct when establishing and maintaining working relationships
- the ways in which you can present a professional image of yourself and those you represent
- the reasons why working relationships are important and how they can be maintained and improved
- the legal and organisational requirements for equality and protected characteristics
- the importance of establishing the roles, responsibilities, constraints and limitations of the people you are working with
- how team dynamics impact on behaviours, including cultural and geographic values
- the limits of your responsibility and authority
- the reasons why effective communication is important
- how to determine the methods of communicating that are appropriate for the audience and the subject
- the ways communication may need to be adapted for internal and external use
- the challenges in communicating with people whose language, dialect or way of speaking is not the same as your own and how these can be overcome
- the ways to minimise misunderstanding and improve communication
- the importance of maintaining good listening skills
- how your use of non-verbal communication may be interpreted by others and how theirs may affect your perceptions of them
- the importance of not using derogatory statements in a work situation
- the importance of maintaining confidentiality and requirements with respect to intellectual property
- how to manage differences or problems with working relationships and the organisational procedures for resolving differences and escalating problems where required
- the importance of evaluating your contribution to working relationships and how this can be done
Scope/range
Scope Performance
Scope Knowledge
Values
Behaviours
Skills
Glossary
Disability – the term is used to refer to individual functioning, including physical impairment, sensory impairment, cognitive impairment, intellectual impairment, mental illness, and various types of chronic disease.
Methods of communication could include:
• face to face
• telephone
• video link
• written message
• verbal message
• electronic message
• email
• social media
• apps
• formal written correspondence
Non-verbal communication – body language, tone of voice, behaviour
Protected characteristics:
• age
• disability
• gender reassignment
• marriage and civil partnership
• pregnancy and maternity
• race
• religion or belief
• sex
• sexual orientation
Ways to minimise misunderstanding and improve communication – for example, taking the time to listen closely, checking your understanding, learning the conventions for introductions and greetings, using gestures, avoiding idioms, explaining acronyms, using pictures and diagrams, learning some phrases in the other person’s language.