Reviewing your performance at work shouldn’t be left until the obligatory annual review or as a precursor to your applying for that new position.
If you feel like you haven’t been reaching your full potential at work, now is the time to take stock of where you are and decide if you want to make some changes at work.
Sit down with your manager, a trusted colleague, partner or friend and talk about your job, and the areas you believe you need to improve. Beginning this journey with an outside perspective helps ensure that you are more realistic about your current performance and may highlight ideas and opportunities that you would not have thought otherwise.
Once you know your starting point, it’s time to decide where you will focus your improvements. Here are four different areas that can support better performance at work.
There are first steps you can take in each of these areas to begin making a real difference in your work. Choose the one that makes the most sense to you and go from there.
It is easy to do your job well when you know what it is you should be doing. Role clarity is one of the most underrated problems of the modern workday. Job titles have become vaguer, and job descriptions are left to gather dust from the moment you log in to work on your first day.
Even if you know what your job is, it’s often impossible to tell which items on your to-do list are more important than others. As we work more with other teams to achieve common goals, there is more duplication and overlap of responsibilities. That makes it more difficult to review and prioritise the tasks that are assigned to you. When you spend the majority of your time working on bits of everything, the most valuable work will never get completed.
It doesn’t matter if you have been in your job for ten days or ten years; everyone benefits from help at work. This could be anything from technical skills training, having someone to answer questions about products or customers, or mentoring to help advance your career to the next level.
At the basic level, everyone at work benefits from having someone they can talk to about what they are working on and what is preventing them from getting things done.
Related: The secret to improving team productivity
Sometimes you aren’t doing the work you know you should be doing because you simply aren’t motivated enough. You spend hours procrastinating on other tasks, and the important tasks remain undone.
When you are not motivated at work, everything takes more effort, and the day can seem twice as long.
We all have the same 24 hours in the day – but we don’t all use them the same way. If you want to perform better at work, your calendar is one of the easiest places to start.
Begin by setting boundaries around your work with start time, breaks and finish time. This gives you a container which you can fill with the right activities. When you set this in your calendar, it helps to reduce unplanned overtime, and you are more likely to take breaks.
Having the right amount of time at and away from work is key to improving your performance. It prevents you from burning out and allows you to show up daily with more energy to do your work well.
Track your time for five working days to clearly understand what your work week looks like. When you see how much time you spend on different activities and link that back to your job, it’s easier to spot places in the week that can be improved.
Imagine what you could achieve if you did things differently for 10 hours of the week next week. Make the changes, and then continue to tweak and improve things as you go along.
When you are focused on improving your performance, the one thing you must do is record your wins. It’s easy to take things for granted when they become embedded in your daily routine. Make it a priority to document your journey and use it as a source of motivation and inspiration in the months ahead.