As an employee, your most significant work desire should be improving your performance at work. Improving your work performance comes with benefits for you as an employee. Some of these benefits are promotions, bonuses, official gifts, and being retained even while other employees are being let go.
Having a standard and impressive work performance can also come with stellar recognition and awards and even recommendations that can open doors of opportunities for you.
However, improving your work performance is not as easy as it sounds. Instead of improving, some employees struggle to maintain their ability to perform well at work. If you are in this category, don’t fret because today, I will be sharing ten tips for improving performance at work.
Tips for improving performance at work
Define milestones
As a professional, sharing your work into milestones is a way to achieve your work goals and finish tasks. Milestones serve as a guide or map in strictly following your tasks and accomplishing them.
When you segment your workload into milestones, you should add a timeframe to achieve them. This would help improve your productivity as you will be working with time and trying to meet up with the assigned milestones. Doing this lets you know the time and date tasks need to be done and when to give them to your boss.
Milestones clear the risk of falling behind schedule and being unproductive.
Establish realistic goals
Most employees plan their week ahead of time and schedule unrealistic goals to meet up with for the week.
There’s something about being a professional. If you are someone working, planning your week is good; being highly organized is good; however, having unrealistic expectations can affect your performance at work.
For example, you are a financial analyst. You planned your week, saying you’d have analyzed so much data for various firms, businesses, and individuals by the end of the week. As a financial analyst, some of the data being analyzed are stocks, bonds, and other types of investment. Stocks fluctuate, and 90% of these financial investments come with so much risk which you can only analyze but can’t control or determine.
You planned your week, saying you’d analyze these things for many businesses. How would you be able to meet up when analyzing one piece of data takes a lot of time? How can you give those businesses financial advice when you aren’t settled and trying to provide financial guidance to other companies too?
There would be so much on your plate that you’d perform poorly by giving inadequate data and poor financial advice.
In a situation like this, the best thing to do is to set clear and realistic goals. Set goals with achievable time frames, align your goals with your business goals, and review your goals regularly to know if you are right on track. Taking on so much workload doesn’t mean you are productive. Productivity can only be measured by quality performance and results. The end goal truly matters, so make sure it’s satisfactory.
Evade multitasking
As a chronic multitasker myself, I know how exhausting it can be. Multitasking doesn’t save the time we think it does. Multitasking impacts negatively more than it does positively sometimes.
90% of the time, people multitask because they have many tasks to accomplish at a given time. So, they are trying to get them all done before the time set for the job elapses. When that time elapses, sometimes, about 60% of the tasks are still not accomplished. These now breed excuses, stress, and poor performance.
Evade multitasking. It may be hard to do so if you are used to it. However, try to evade it.
Replace multitasking with prioritization.
Instead of multitasking, prioritize your tasks. Pick the most important tasks and work on them individually. Doing this would enable you to do quality work. And a lot of people prefer quality over quantity.
Plan your time (prioritize tasks)
This tip is quite similar to the one above. Time management skills are something every employee should have. Not being able to plan your time correctly can ruin your work performance. While another staff is submitting the work done, you are busy struggling to round up your tasks. Whoever is in charge at work would see the difference in your productivity level.
Most people are required to work 40 hours per week, so try to allocate your time to prioritized tasks. Prioritizing your tasks is the only way you can meet the deadlines for the week. Remember, quality over quantity.
Improve your communication skills
Having good communication skills can help boost your work performance. When working on a team project, communicating effectively with your team members will positively impact the overall quality of the project and the overall performance of the whole team.
Communication is also essential when you work with executives and shareholders or are in charge of marketing or contacting clients.
Airing your views or communicating with your work colleagues and bosses can help you overcome challenges or difficulties which you may be having at work.
Ask questions about that project to avoid making mistakes. Communicate clearly how work is to be done and what’s expected. Communicate your concerns about something at work you don’t understand. Please don’t waste your time trying to do it alone, you could make mistakes that would ruin your work performance or worse, the company.
Find a work-life balance
Having a functional work-life balance is good for you and can improve your work performance. Prioritize your mental health. It is essential to take breaks when it’s needed. Don’t overwork yourself to avoid becoming burned out and unmotivated.
Once you’ve worked the 40 hours per week assigned to you, enjoy the remaining hours left. Have enough sleep, eat a balanced diet, read books, watch movies, visit family and friends, attend dinner parties, attend concerts, or do anything you consider fun and relaxing that can help you unwind after a long stressful week.
Avoid distractions
No matter how committed you are to the task, you can still be distracted. Distractions at work can ruin work performance. Distractions can come in various ways. Often, distractions come from ourselves and other people. Some common types of distraction in the workplace are:
- Phone calls – excessive phone calls can cause distractions in the workplace. So you should set your phone on vibration. I would have suggested setting it on silence or switching it off; however, in case of an emergency; it’s risky.
- Office gossip – Having fun and interactive colleagues can be both a blessing and a curse. Fun and interactive coworkers can make you feel more comfortable in the workplace. However, these interactions can be a distraction and affect your work performance.
- Being absent-minded – lack of concentration is very bad as a professional. Being absent-minded when performing tasks is terrible and can breed numerous mistakes in jobs or projects you may be handling. Try as much as possible to focus on the task at hand.
- Having a colleague who chews gum – Having a colleague who chews gum loudly can be a form of distraction. Nobody wants to be hearing that aggressively chewing or popping sound when working.
- Constantly fiddling with your smartphone – Unless your job permits you to be on your phone all day long, you shouldn’t do so. Drop your phone on your desk and focus on the work in front of you.
Eliminating these distractions will help you improve your work performance. The list of possible distractions in the workplace is long, but these are a few worth mentioning.
Find good work tools
Every worker needs tools to work efficiently. It could be a laptop, a pen, books, apps, software, WiFi, etc. Having good work tools helps in improving performance at work
For example, a photographer needs a good camera.
A UI/UX designer needs apps like Figma, Adobe XD, Behance, and so on.
A writer needs a journal, pens, and writing software
A coder needs a laptop.
A makeup artist needs varieties of makeup products.
The point is that every single professional needs a tool—farmers, teachers, doctors, engineers, cleaners, security, etc. Having inadequate tools will ruin the quality of your projects.
Picture yourself as an executive assistant, and you have a dysfunctional laptop or computer. You would continually lose important files; you can’t take notes during meetings because your keyboard will hang; you can’t make schedules because part of your screen is blank.
How can you help your boss with his business if all your work tools aren’t working well?
The answer is “you can’t.”
So having good work tools can improve your work performance.
Organize your desk or working space
Have you ever had an overcrowded work table and mistakenly knocked over your coffee which spilled onto the file you were supposed to hand over to your boss in an hour?
If you haven’t been in this situation, try not to find yourself in one.
You would have panic attacks on the spot, and there won’t be anyone to save you.
Having an organized desk or working space gives you enough room to work. It also saves you the time you’d waste looking for a file that might be right in front of you. Arrange all your files into a cabinet, and clear out your workspace. Finally, a decluttered space helps the brain function better. It’s been proven that a tidier space can make for a more relaxed mind.
Be organized!
Prioritize your health
We’ve spoken about the importance of prioritizing your mental health. Now, it’s time to talk about your physical health. Being physically healthy is important for productive work performance. If you are ill and frail, you can’t handle the busy work environment. You’d be exhausted even before the day starts.
Moreover, working yourself too hard till you fall sick does not benefit anybody (both you and your employer). No company would want to work with someone who isn’t healthy. They’d quickly replace you once you aren’t being as productive as before. So, prioritize your health. Eat balanced diets, go to the gym, sleep regularly, and go on medical checkups.
Remember, health is wealth. And no employee is irreplaceable. So, put yourself first!
Conclusion
Improving your work performance can only be done when you are willing. Words without action wouldn’t work. So, try to incorporate these tips, and you’ll see improvements in your work performance in no time.
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