We’ve all had to do group projects. You don’t escape middle school, high school and definitely not college without suffering through many, many group projects and activities.

Nearly every student dreads these projects because we all know what’s going to happen: one or two people will do all the work but all five group members will get the credit and reap the reward.

Occasionally we land ourselves in a good group filled with people who all want to pull their own weight. It’s a rare miracle and something to be cherished.

However, group projects don’t end when you get out of school. They don’t stop once you receive your diploma. To be honest, in a majority of jobs you’ll have and professions you’ll go into, your entire occupation is just going to be one big group project. Sounds terrible, right?

But the stakes are a little different. You’re all (hopefully) there because you want to be and on some level, you enjoy the work.

In some jobs, you’re literally assigned to work with a specific team of people, and they’re the ones that you’ll work with and relate to on a daily basis. With other jobs, there’s aren’t specific teams per se, but everyone that you work with on the same shift is your team.

Even if you don’t do the same job, your work impacts their work and vice versa. When you start a job, the people that you see and work with, or next to, or across from are your team. They are your group and your career is the project you’re all working on together.

The team you're with matters almost more than the job you're performing.

I’m a firm believer in this. The team that you get put in can make or break your job experience. You could have a terrible job but the people who work the same shift as you make it bearable.

Your boss might throw a seemingly-unmanageable project on your desk, but if you know that you have a good team of competent coworkers that you can suffer through it with, it lessens the suffering ever so slightly.

You might get a slew of terrible and rude customers that make you wanna cry (or quit). The people right next you letting you vent to them not only keeps you from punching rude people in the face, they also help you keep your emotions in balance. A good team is vital to a good work experience regardless of how much you like or dislike your job.

Unfortunately, though, this can work in the opposite direction as well. A bad team can make a good job, for lack of a better phrase, start to suck. You could love the work that you’re doing, but if you get put with a team of people who are incompetent, it can start to be a drag. If the people that you work with every day are rude, disrespectful or bigoted, it can make work more of a stressor than it is supposed to be or needs to be.

You can keep your head down and dodge conversations all you want, but at the end of the day, those people are still on your team. They're wearing away at your mental state and lowering your desire to show up to work every day. I know people who started out loving their jobs, but then there was a change in management or an employee overhaul and they got stuck working with people that they couldn’t stand. It made them start looking for a new place to work.

On a day-to-day basis, you will probably see your coworkers more than anyone else.

That’s just a fact that people need to come to grips with and realize the impact that it has. You spend eight-plus hours at your job every day (depending on your work), and some people end up having to take their work home with them. You have a lot of contact with your bosses and coworkers. If they suck, it can exhaust you--even if you’re in a profession that you’re passionate about.

Your coworkers are your team, the people you spend the most time with, and in some cases, some of those people end up becoming more like family rather than just shift-buddies. So when the dynamic gets thrown off, it can create a very stressful work environment; now you’re stuck with spending about a third of your day with people that you’d love to hit in the face with a chair.

The work that you’re doing can be great, or it can be awful. Most times you suck it up and work through it because you have bills to pay. Or maybe you landed your dream job and the work doesn’t even feel like work.

Regardless of whatever scenario you find yourself in, your team is a pivotal part of your workplace. It’s not always a matter of what you’re doing, but rather who you’re doing it with. If you find yourself at a job where you can’t stand your team, you probably won’t find yourself there for very long.

You spend so much time with your work and your coworkers, and the least you owe yourself is making sure you’re spending your time with a team that you can count on and that you enjoy working with.