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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeart Radio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to do fairness checks, particularly at work but in any situation where you've got team projects.

You want to make sure that everyone feels like you are pulling together. Regular fairness checks are a great way to figure that out.

Today's tip comes from Tessa West's new book Jerks at Work, Toxic co-workers and what to do about them.

This guide to handling difficult colleagues helps people with the messy reality that not everyone is automatically great to work with.

But when we still need to get stuff done, there's a lot we can do to improve the situation.

One of the most common kinds of toxic co-workers is the free rider.

You no doubt remember this character from your school days when the group project meant you and maybe one other person did all the work.

And the free riders were nowhere to be found until it was time to collect the good grades or in the workplace version get credit with the boss.

The problem with free riders is not just that they are annoying though of course they are. It's that we soon have a tragedy of the commons situation.

If free riders keep getting away with their free rides, other folks who might have been more diligent notice the lack of accountability.

So they put their attention elsewhere.

Tessa notes that in groups, fairness applies to how jobs are decided, who does what, how rewards are determined and how final decisions are made.

When procedures aren't fair, people aren't set up to contribute evenly to the group and slacking spreads.

So she recommends a two-part fairness check. She says that you can start this process at any time during group decision making.

Part one, at the beginning of a project, is to have the team make a list together of what each team member's tasks are for that time period.

This ensures task visibility. Tessa writes.

Then, part two happens periodically. You have team members complete a short survey that checks on each person's progress. Tessa recommends four questions.

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