Leave job due to harassment at office

Should I leave my good job if colleagues are harassing me?
Time it according to your personal situation

Karen is being harassed by her colleagues in the hope that she will quit so that they can divide her work and get raises as part of a conspiracy hatched by her boss. She writes, "Well, last week I spoke to one of my team-mates. Shockingly, she is filled with negative thoughts. Some are true but many are nonsense. I don't know speaking to her was right. What should I do? Remain in this job? No one is even talking to me. My team members turned up against me. I have spoken to a senior person in the organization and he advised me to talk to them but as mentioned above all went in vain. Please help."

I am sorry to hear that you have been put into this unfortunate set of circumstances by your colleagues. Actually, it is a common practice worldwide to force people to quit so that others can take that position. Office politics at its best.

I suggest, therefore, that you quit. The timing, of course, will depend on your financial situation. If you have the financial freedom to do so, I will say that you quit immediately and take some time off -- say 3 months -- to either travel or to join some kind of training related to your job. So when you apply for a new job you will have an excuse that either you needed some time off to fulfill a lifelong dream to spend 3 months in Italy, for example, or say working as a volunteer in Somalia; or you wanted to improve your prospects for a better job by studying a new area related to your expertise. That way you will get a break from this nasty job but you would not have to answer uncomfortable questions about why you left. If the new employer gets an idea that you left because you could not get along with your colleagues, you may have a hard time even finding another job.

If you cannot quit immediately, then, start your job search immediately, and as soon as you have a job lined up, quit this one.

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