How does Behavior Drive Performance in the Workplace?

Behaviors impact workplace and work performance a great deal. In daily professional life at the workplace, you get together with different people who have unlike educational, professional, and family backgrounds. In a diversified workplace environment, employees meet with workers and customers from cultures, languages, dialects, ethnicities, and habitats.

Conversely, starting from how an employee, colleague, boss, or subordinate converse with others, to the moods, feelings, and disposition in tasks’ performance, they shape the workplace outlook, pleasant or unpleasant work environments, and impact the workplace in terms of organizational performance.

What is Behavior in the Workplace?

Behavior at the workplace means how an employee behaves when at work with colleagues. The behaviors, positive or negative, define a personality and work ways consequently affecting the task output in particular and employees' performance in general perspective.

It is more formal than being casual with friends due to the appropriateness of the conversations required as per the job descriptions. For example: a lawyer’s behaviors and dealings with clientele and colleagues would be different from an employee working in the marketing or finance dominion.

Importance of good behavior in the Workplace

Good behavior results in defining a positive workplace environment creating a conduciveness for coworkers and customers to perform at their fullest capacity and enjoy their work. Positive or good behaviors at work also work for employees’ capacity building and performance enhancement.

Following are a few areas that may be affected by good behavior at the workplace:

Morale

Good behavior at the workplace boosts employee and organizational morale which results in decreased absenteeism and lessened turnover costs.

Productivity

Good (positive) and appropriate requisite behaviors at work improve positivity at the workplace. It attracts team members to work together for a joint target completion timely, consequently enhancing productivity and morale.

Employee Retention

The existing employees have job satisfaction and are retained by the organizations due to a positive work culture because of appropriate and good behaviors at the workplace. This attracts top talent to join your organization as a dream company where proper and encouraging behaviors define organizational design, culture, and improvised productivity.

Company Reputation

Affirmative and progressive positive behaviors at the workplace explain your organizational reputation before clients, employees, and to-be workers. In an era of high info-tech, organizational reputation is no longer hidden and predefines the courage or concern of candidates to apply for any position in the organization or otherwise.

How do behaviors affect the work performance?

Following are some behaviors that affect work performance:

How Happiness Affects Work Performance?

Happiness is an outcome of constructive behavior in the workplace. On the contrary, negative behaviors induce negativity in the workplace environment. Progression in performance can yield from helpful and positive (happy) working place.

If team members become sad due to the bad behavior, they are mostly unable to produce positive results. The happier way the workers communicate with each other is the same way they deal with customers in most cases.

How Rudeness and Gossip Affect Work Performance?

Employees spend time gossiping at the workplace and rudeness in behaviors affects work performance to a decreasing trend on the organizational goals completion and task performance graphs. Notions like helping others, begging pardon for own mistakes and shortcomings of the team, and thanking others for good help done, are key to positivism and better performance induction.

How Bullying Affects Work Performance?

Bullying is a dangerous trait for any individual or group anywhere. It is a deliberate intention to undermine others that could be physical, moral, financial, or gender-based. This negative behavior can drastically affect work performance and behavior, resulting in poor output along with physical, moral, psychological, and health problems.

How Bad Managers Affect Employees?

Bad coworkers and managers affect employees badly. They often go by choosing the roadmap of micromanagement, possess offensive behavior in speaking, pointing out little things that are ignorable otherwise, and demand a very quick completion of tasks on a routine basis that is not possible for subordinates with someone standing most of the time on shoulders and shouting on.

Factors Affecting Workplace Behavior

Certain factors affect workplace behavior. Of those, mentioned below are a few:

Job duties and responsibilities

A manager should make sure to assign duties and tasks at hand to subordinates that match the individual’s qualifications and experiences in general, and expertise and exposures in particular. This approach fosters an easy-going office environment, and many employees may work willingly on tasks they are familiar with.

Moreover, supervisors should focus on the capabilities improvement of workers for career path advancement. This way, both current and future job duties, responsibilities, and tasks at hand play a role in promoting workplace-encouraging behaviors.

Communication

Communication is a factor, among other factors, that affects workplace behavior. Involving your workers in decision-making processes from new product development, sales decline problems, and market new entrants, to entering into new markets, product upgrade, and diversification decisions. Communicating with your employees (through inclusion) has an impact on workplace behavior and that would better shape your workforce to align the mission and vision with your company.

Work culture

Workplace culture is the foremost of the factors that shape and affect workplace behavior. Transparent rules and equality in regulations for (almost, where possible) every tier of the organization make employees feel equally treated. With this, supporting employees at times of crisis helps create a sense of job security within your workers causing employee retention. This said sort of work culture positively affects workplace behaviors.

Personal life

Workers under varying levels of stress, whether due to professional reasons or personal challenges at home, often struggle with maintaining a proper work-life balance. Those battling internal conflicts tend to withdraw from social interactions and team memberships. This not only hampers their societal behavior but also takes a toll on their personal lives, further affecting their workplace behavior and performance.

Work relationships

Team building is an essential tool to cope with workplace relationship problems. If not paid head to the said, workers’ relationship worries between themselves, and with higher or lower communication slab within the company, affects workplace behaviors negatively. A disconnection between people may happen due to relationship problems, hence it is challenging and not advisable to ignore workplace relationship betterment.

Positive Behavioral Traits and Their Impact

There are some factors,

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is identifying own and others’ emotions with empathy, along with personal emotional regulation, and relationship management. All four facets of emotional intelligence are vital sources of (positive attitudes or) positive behavioral traits to impact the workplace positively. Emotional intelligence helps avoid problems, solve unresolved matters, enhance team cooperation, and help in conflict resolution at the workplace.

Emotional Intelligence in HR at Workplace →

Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is an important tool for workplace success and indeed is an asset for the organization. Thinking out of the box solutions for problems gives businesses opportunities for further market development and expanding their customer base to serve more segments than before. This tool essentially provides employees with creative solutions for personal goals’ achievement and company performance betterment.

Time Management

Time management is yet another tremendous tool for almost any success in the personal and professional lives. Whether it is reaching the office on time, or a timely delivery to a client, aptness and timeliness (time management is very important. Time management helps organizations and employees prioritize job performance tasks, delegate responsibilities effectively, and deadlines’ meeting efficiently. Time management converts workers from ordinary employees to extraordinary ones and turns workers into valuable assets for the companies.

Professionalism

Professionalism is an unavoidable asset for any employee or organization to be a good performer. Workers need to follow gentility, sociability, mutual respect, honesty, and hospitality when dealing with customers. What is more, being truthful, reliable, and having honest integrity are central signs of professionalism.

Extending better support to customers, when it comes to clients’ problems, gives you an edge over the market competition. The said components of professionalism are defined as worker-positive behavioral traits impacting organizational profitability enormously.

Dependability

Dependability in trait behaviorism is directed towards the worker being indispensable, valuable, and reliable for the employer. Quality work, timeliness of completion of given roles, and showing up in the office on time are some sub-traits explaining positive dependability. Most employers are of the view that employer-employee trust-building boosts achievement of workplace success that further requires employees to work hard but smart, take initiative, and prove a committed workforce.

Adaptability

Adaptability refers to adjustment to new conditions. As global businesses face ever-changing crucial macro-environments, adaptability helps organizations to thrive. Flexibility, open-mindedness, understanding, meaning, timeliness, clarity, predictability, and a degree of control, are determinants of adaptability that help companies flourish even in business turbulence.

Continuous Learning

Whenever there is change, there is learning. If there is no change, there is no learning. Employees and organizations learn from past experiences, therefore finance personnel operate budgetary allocation presumptions based on the previous year’s performance with a throughout view of inflation trends in the past and ahead.

Continuous learning refers to keeping oneself informed about market and business trends, learning new techniques, carrying on the ladder of the latest developments both info-technical and non-tech, looking into the industry insights, and making your employees learn new skills, to be in line with the growing body of worldwide knowledge and global developments in terms of organizational success.

Workplace Behaviors of Successful Employees

Some workplace behaviors make employees successful. Of those, specifics are mentioned here:

Overachiever and Problem Solver

An imperative employee needs to be an overachiever, a critical thinker for the sake of betterment, and an out-of-the-box problem solver. Overachievers remain either adding or cutting something from the products or processes for mere improvement and developmental purposes. This trait gives them an edge over other employees. Problem solvers do not merely bring problems to the desk of a manager or supervisor but with the possible solutions before management.

Outstanding Communicator and Trustworthy

Successful employees are outstanding communicators and trustworthy too. What time is for what, when, how, why, and where, are the vital turning points in the good mindsets of outstanding employees (high performers) to consider and implement in their professional lives that make them successful workers? Not only for being a successful employee, but these traits are very important for customer service orientation as well.

Trustworthiness is a trait that a supervisor or manager may trust an employee to delegate an assignment and in turn, get it done on time with effectiveness, reliability, and efficiency. Trustworthy employees do not hide from the chaos but they go through the instability of times, if any, in a quite professional manner showing tolerant and contentment types of behaviors.

Humble and Adaptable

Being humble is to accept your own and others’ mistakes and rectify them. International HR standards do not allow pointing out an employee, but rather a process or an act on the part of whole team members including the supervisors. The same goes for achievements and tangibly development tenures.

Adaptable workers learn about the company, its products, processes, services, and customers at a faster pace than others. Their easy workflow allows novel things to adapt to the organizational change times. Market expectations require an adaptable workforce in companies to be successful organizations.

Team Player and Dependable

A team player is a worker who is not a threat to others, nor does s/he presume others as a danger zone. Communication, humility, and cooperation when it comes to teamwork, are the worthy traits of a team player. Employers are advised to reward team players because they are your company workers who are not only themselves an asset for you but an inspirational force for structuring and enhancing teams, and building trust.

Whereas, employers should not micromanage their dependable employees who produce work on time without much supervision. Such dependable workers can be assigned confidential data and duties. Nonetheless, dependable workers are motivators for others to be dependable and improve trustworthiness in organizations.

Strategies to Foster Positive Behavior in the Workplace

There are several strategies to foster positive behavior (performance behavior) in the workplace. Some of these are appended below:

Open Communication

Communication is an important tool for any endeavor to be a successful project. Horizontal (with the same level) and vertical (the levels up and down) communication are unavoidably necessary strategies for fostering workplace positivism.

In a bureaucratic organizational design and culture, this does not mean speaking against some policies or procedural code of conduct but professionally for improvement purposes only, provided it does not open Pandora's box, as organizations do possess such few employees unwantedly.

Importantly, in an organic organizational culture and design, open communication means that employees are free to express their ideas, opinions, and concerns not only to colleagues but to the top management as well.

Training and Development

Training for existing assignments completion and development for future missions is a key strategy to organizational success. Training improves productivity and development enhances capacity and encourages employees to take further assignments of their own choice. This improves the career path development of employees and companies. 

Feedback Mechanisms

In companies, when it comes to feedback mechanisms, it is an output in the form of input back to the circuit completing a cycle. In other words, customers and workers are allowed to openly provide feedback that might be negative at times but management receives it and utilizes that for improvement of certain products, services, or processes, whatever the case may be.

Clear Expectations

Clear expectations means setting clear, often, and early expectation and communicating the same to your employees. But remember that employers’ or employees’ expectations should be realistic, attainable, possess clear metrics, and sometimes different from your expectations that can be better ones.

Summary

Behavior drives performance in the workplace, and with this in mind, employers are advised to strengthen their employee onboarding processes. They should stay attuned to their customers’ desires as well as the needs of their staff, remain informed about competitors, and foster open lines of communication. Recognizing achievements by rewarding both employees and customers is crucial, as is investing in up-skilling and offering avenues for career advancement.

Establishing an organizational design and culture that is both nurturing and aspirational is vital to attracting top-tier talent. The goal isn’t merely about increased profitability; it's about serving a broader segment of existing and potential clients, ensuring stellar customer service, and cultivating a globally satisfied consumer base.