5 Tips To Improve Your Performance

The author of "The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence" covers the latest digital business and innovation market trends. Here are some of his recommendations on how to be a better worker and colleague.

1 Stop Complaining

Complaining can bring very negative side effects. It can divide the team, delay work, and endanger productive engagement. As described by Very Well Mind "As you focus more on minimizing your complaining and maximizing your gratitude and excitement about life, you will likely feel a difference in your stress levels and your level of overall life satisfaction."

Three strategies to dissuade complaining attitude are: Interrupting undesirable thoughts with the mental image of a stop sign or the word "stop!" and moving towards finding the solutions. Another way is writing about the problem and how it makes you feel and proceeding to brainstorm solutions and find the bright side of your situation. Lastly, counting your blessings can help you switch your focus away from annoying things and center on how lucky you are.

2. Propose Solutions

Make sure you take the time to understand the problem and find how the problem arose in the first place. Ask for previous solutions and solutions to similar scenarios. Being compassionate toward team members is key as well as blaming someone can result hurtful and unproductive. As Bizfluent suggests "be kind when figuring out a solution. Ask the employees questions about their opinion and take into account what they suggest."

Consider different kinds of solutions before choosing one. Many problems don’t only have one correct solution and they depend on time frames and resources. If you are not directly affected by the issue, allow those involved to decide which solution to use. This gives confidence to your colleagues and helps them to learn how to solve problems independently.

Also read: NEW SKILLS FOR SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

3. Teach Others

Permanent knowledge-sharing benefits your workplace. It increases social interaction in the team, incentivizes creative problem solving, preserves previous knowledge even if employees retire or leave, and enables a systematization of information that allows different departments to access the information needed, speeding up production. Bloomfire recommends giving out incentives and creating knowledge libraries. As well as facilitating communication across the teams and providing capacitation on communication strategies if needed. 

4. Be Humble

Listening to everyone in your team regardless of their position, writing thank you letters, and sharing fairly the credit for achievements are just some ways to be humble at work. These strengthen both your team and results. 

According to Indeed, humble employees can be more open to collaborating, valuing others' contributions, and working for a common goal instead of viewing coworkers as competition. Being humble at work can also help you celebrate the victories of your coworkers which builds a healthy and encouraging working atmosphere. Finally, being humble can make it easier to build genuine relationships with your colleagues and, as said by Indeed "enhance your reputation as a person with integrity."

5. Measure Results

It is important to start by understanding metrics beyond descriptions like "great" or "really successful." Expression like these can mean quite different things to each person. "Specific metrics ensure everyone is on the same page," according to Workfront. 

Five things to consider when measuring metrics are a mix, capacity, velocity quality, and engagement. A mix is the portion of work done to run the business compared to the work done to change it. This ratio should reflect the company’s objectives. Then is the necessity to measure the total capacity for work and if employees are achieving that capacity. Velocity refers to how long it takes to get things done and to have a system in place to understand how often people fall behind schedule.

Quality answers to the question of if your results match the expectations you had. Measuring these requires defining what is meant by success. Finally, engagement is the level to which employees believe their work matters, want to do more than their tasks and innovate while feeling happy in their work and recommend to others their workplace.