If you want to excel in your career and pursue better opportunities, it is vital to seek guidance for your professional development. This will help you to enhance your productivity at work and acquire valuable skills. This article discusses a few major areas of development that employees must focus on to boost their performance at work and build a solid career.
- Set your goals straight.
It is pertinent for you to strategize your goals to gain more direction in your career. Usually team-led projects already have a defined set of deadlines and objectives to achieve. However, for your personal development and satisfaction, you must set your own goals.
Tips to help achieve goals:
- Break down long-term goals into smaller, baby steps
- Keep a journal/electronic spreadsheet to jot down your tasks
- Develop visual representations of your goals, such as a vision board
- Communicate with people.
Secondly, you must practise communicating with your colleagues. It is okay to have a different communication style than other workers, but you must ensure yours is effective for building positive relationships with others.
Ways to improve communication skills:
- Stick to one mode of communication
- Establish a routine for meetings
- Assign new people to discussion leader position every time
- Learn to manage your time.
Another key area of development for employees is time management. In order to boost your productivity at work, you should learn to multitask and accomplish deadlines. This is an excellent way to make your job less stressful and also gives you time to attend to other activities outside of work.
Techniques to enhance time management:
- Create to-do lists; go crazy with colourful sticky notes
- Use free scheduling applications
- Keep track of your time and activities
- Improve your customer service.
Whether you work with external customers or not, customer service skills are crucial to your overall work experience. Good customer service can significantly boost an organization’s image. You must know how to effectively communicate with clients – if that is your job – and address their queries/issues amicably.
Ways to refine customer service:
- Seek help from a colleague who is excellent at customer service
- Ask your manager for some useful tips
- Take online training courses
- Collaborate with your co-workers.
Teamwork is the dream-work. Teams who cooperate well are more likely to achieve their goals at work and address challenges faster than those who do not. In addition, working in a group can also enhance productivity and improve the quality of deliverables.
Strategies to augment collaboration:
- Develop camaraderie through brainstorming sessions
- Participate in team-building activities with your colleagues
- Be responsive to co-workers’ input
- Acquire conflict resolution skills.
Another key area of development for employees is of conflict mediation. Often disagreement arise among colleagues with no easy solutions in sight. If you find yourself in such a tricky situation, your conflict resolution skills might help you deal with it.
Tips to overcome workplace disagreements:
- Participate in conflict resolution trainings
- Curb your emotions while dealing with a difficult situation
- Avoid an accusatory war with your colleague/s
- Accept constructive feedback on your performance.
An effective way to learn and grow at your job is to be responsive to constructive feedback. It can really help you to improve the quality of your work as well as build positive relationships with your colleagues.
Ways to be open to constructive feedback.
- Engage in trainings that teach effective practices for constructive criticism
- Have an open mind towards accepting feedback
- Practise inculcating constructive comments into your work
- Honesty is the best policy.
Another key area of development for you is to remain honest to your work. This is vital to fostering strong and durable relationships with your co-workers.
Tips to boost honesty at work:
- Keep your word when you commit to tasks
- Take responsibility for your actions
- Respect confidential information
- Enhance proactiveness at work.
In order to exhibit leadership and seek better opportunities at work, you must learn to take action before you are asked. You will surely relieve the management of the need to constantly monitor you as well as increase their confidence in your performance.
Ways to be more proactive:
- Prioritize your tasks at work
- Do hard tasks first
- Pay close attention to clients’ and co-workers’ needs
- Build up perseverance.
Finally, you must be perseverant to deal with challenging tasks. This is a vital area of development you must focus on as an employee. There will be times when you are faced with tough clients or difficult colleagues. However, you should not give up and press on.
Strategies to boost perseverance:
- Practise analysing challenges
- Keep a calm demeanour
- Collaborate to work out possible solutions
