Performance at work is more than ever a subject that interests companies, senior management, executives and employees in general, regardless of their level of responsibility.
This article will give you an overview of several important factors if your ambition is to improve your team or individual performance at work.
I would like you to join me in this thought provoking exercise to identify factors that influence performance at work. I came up with numerous factors at first when I started brainstorming for this article. Although I believe that 6 factors are extremely important and directly linked to performance at work. These factors are: health, motivation, support, skills, goals and happiness.
The factors are not necessarily in order of importance due to the fact that it can vary what affects your performance the most. For some people it might be health; perhaps the number 1 threat for others is the lack of support at work or even their personal life contributing to lack of motivation and low energy levels on how to perform.
Going back to the identified 6 factors, I would like to explore each factor in more detail.
Health- It is a very straightforward link here, if you suffer from poor health, your performance at work will be reflective on that as a result. That is if you are well enough to work, one of the present issues at work is presenteeism where both employers and employees pay a high price tag due to poor health. My advice is to look after yourself, think what’s really important in life and be honest with your employers in asking for help to address the issue, if that is the case.
Motivation- I come from a Sports background, we all know how important motivation is in order to perform at your best. Let’s go back to the Olympics for instance, what was the athletes motivation to train day in day out, week in week out, month in month out? Yes the Olympic Games! The dream of winning a medal….
In your working life the focus is harder to conceive compared to the Olympics, however motivation is equally important if you want to perform and remain focused. My advice to employers is to find suitable and relevant reward systems for employees. Remember not everybody is the same, so address your workforce with an individual and human centred approach for better results.
Support- all companies and expect their people to perform at their best. It’s a big thing to ask, as you are dealing with people. You can’t dictate and predict their performance…what I mean is you cannot expect constant peak performance from the human race. We have feelings, emotions, moods, thoughts, problems and many other factors which can easily affect your performance.
You can support people by engaging with them on a human level, and by doing that you can expect to help people to perform to their peak performance more often and for longer periods of time.
The fourth factor is Skills; This is an area where performance is often most affected due to lack of skills, undeveloped skills or even nonexistent skills to perform certain tasks. Therefore, training and developing your people should be at the top of your list if you wish them to perform at work.
The next factor is my favourite subject, Goals. I will be writing a book on it soon. By having ambitious, realistic and sustainable goals will directly impact on your capacity to perform. Whether you are pushing for a promotion, looking to develop skills or finishing a big project…whatever the goal is, will keep you focused and motivated therefore make sure you have challenging goals behind everything you do.
Finally the last factor is happiness, today positive psychology research is very advanced and we can rely on some existing studies that link happiness to productivity and performance. It is however, a very straightforward conclusion, if you are happy in what you doing you will input everything into your actions and therefore performance will be up there with it. Well let’s be happy, you are only one decision away from happiness. I hope this article contributes to your overall performance at work, please take notice of the cited factors. However, there are hundreds of other potential factors that can influence performance. I had to narrow it down to what I believe would be more significant in terms of performing better at work. I hope you enjoyed it.
High Performing Regards
Joao Bocas
CEO of Sports13
Joao can be contacted:
E-mail: joao@sports13.co.uk
www.sports13.co.uk
