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In this article, we share simple strategies you can employ starting today to improve your performance at work and get back on the right track.
Ways to Improve Your Work Performance Immediately
Workplace demands and employee expectations are higher than they have ever been before. Most companies today are looking for ways to drive efficiency and get more out of their teams, and with this heightened focus on performance and output comes employees feeling pressure and questioning whether they’re meeting expectations. While this can be really stressful, the good news is that there are a lot of simple tweaks employees make in their weekly processes that can drastically improve your work performance immediately. If you’re someone who is struggling to keep up at work, but don’t know where to start or how to improve, this article is for you! We will get into things like the importance of organization, prioritization, communication, personal health, and more. Let’s get into it!
1. Get organized
Getting organized and building a weekly schedule is one of the most powerful ways to improve your work performance immediately. Organization allows employees to see and keep track of all the tasks they need to complete. This leads to less stress, which leads to better performance. It’s that simple.
Smart systems to Improve Your Work Performance Immediately
- Email Management: To create fast organization, use filters and folders to categorize your mail. For example, you can create folders for ‘Urgent’, ‘Important but not Urgent’, and ‘Routine’ emails. You can also set up rules to automatically sort incoming messages to keep your inbox clutter-free.
- Smart Calendar System: Color-coding your meetings on your calendar to differentiate between the type of meeting it is. For example, you can put client meetings in blue, deep work sessions in yellow, admin tasks in red. You can also use blocks like “Do Not Schedule (DNS)” to ensure you have time reserved for focused, non-interrupted work.
- Reactive vs proactive work: If your work involves answering inbound requests while doing forward-looking, project based work, consider splitting your week up for reactive vs proactive tasks. For example, you could dedicate Monday and Wednesday to replying to inbounds, and Thursday and Friday to getting project work done. Or if you need to be reactive daily, you can set the morning aside for reactive work and reserve the afternoons for deeper strategic work.
- Organize your browser and Slack: If you are someone who gets a ton of messages in a day, create channels for different projects or teams, and mute channels that are not immediately relevant or distracting. In your browser (like Google Chrome), set up folders and bookmarks for frequently used websites or documents. Right-click on the bookmark bar, select ‘add folder’, and start bucketings your materials into various categories for easier navigation.
2. Set weekly goals
Another simple way to improve your work performance immediately is setting weekly goals for yourself. Take lofty, overwhelming goals, and break them into more manageable pieces of work.
Set weekly goals using the OKR framework
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, and it’s one of the most widely used frameworks in the tech industry. Companies like Google and Amazon were some of the first adopters of this framework, and attribute a lot of their early success to the framework’s ability to drive action and output. This framework helps you define measurable goals and track the outcomes of those goals.
- Objective: Set yourself a clear, qualitative goal at the start of the week. This can be a portion of a much larger goal that you are assigned to complete for the quarter, or even year. For example, ‘improve my customer support for tier 1 accounts’ or ‘improve the go-to-market strategy for the new product feature”. These smaller goals could ladder into larger goals such as improve customer NPS’ or ‘grow market share in the region’. See how we are taking a very large task and breaking it down into something much more manageable?
- Key Results: Define 2-3 measurable outcomes that will measure whether or not you were successful. For example, ‘reduce average time to respond to emails by 1 hour’ or ‘get signoff from marketing on the new one pager for the sales team’. These results should be things that you can easily say ‘yes I completed it’ or ‘no I didn’t complete it’ and it allows you to be honest with yourself on the progress you are making towards your larger goals.
By focusing on specific smaller objectives and measurable results, you create a roadmap for your week that ensures you’re working on the most impactful tasks.
3. Prioritize your tasks
One of the best ways to improve your work performance immediately is to take a deep look at all the tasks you have to do and make sure you are prioritizing them appropriately.
Split to-dos into ‘must do’ and ‘do later’ buckets
One of the simplest ways to prioritize is by writing down a list of all the tasks you ended to complete, and then splitting the items into one of two buckets:
- Must Do Now: These are the tasks that must be completed either today or this week and are often tied to deadlines.
- Do Later: These are the tasks that are on your list of to-dos, but not immediately necessary. These should be completed in a timely manner, but not necessarily today or this week even.
Make a daily checklist
The act of making a daily checklist is a powerful one. Take the “must do now” list that you just created and create a checklist of all the tasks. As you complete each task, check it off the list. This not only allows you to keep track of what is done, but it also gives you a nice sense of accomplishment.
Save last-minute tasks for a specific end of day period
In any stressful job, last minute or unexpected tasks are bound to come up. Instead of getting derailed by tackling them in the moment, just save time at the end of each day to handle them. This way, you don’t lose momentum on the other project you were working on.
4. Practice strong communication
Strong communication plays a big role in workplace performance. It shows those that work with you that you are detail oriented, organized, and on top of your game.
Align everyone on a project
If you are leading a project, it’s very important that you make sure everyone is on the same page at all times. To do this, you need to communicate clearly and often. Start by making sure that everyone on the project is aligned on the objective, deadlines, and individual responsibilities. Make sure to host regular check ins and send followup emails to maintain alignment at all times.
Over-communicate to avoid missing details
If you are the type of person that often misses the small details, it’s good practice for you to just over-communicate each step of the way. By over-communicating – either in a status update meeting or via email – you force yourself to think through each aspect of the project at the lowest level of detail, thus reducing the chances that you miss a tiny detail.
Communicate early if you are going to miss a deadline
It’s totally natural for things to come up. That said, if you don’t warn your team mates or boss ahead of time, it usually doesn’t end well for you. Instead of beating yourself up and suffering in silence, just communicate the facts of the situation early on. The people you tell will most likely be appreciative of the fact that you gave them ample warming so they can contingency plan.
5. Double (or triple) check your work
We are all human, and mistakes do happen. Instead of just submitting work without a review, follow these quick tips to improve your work performance immediately.
- Spell-check and grammar review: Use a spell-checker on your documents and emails, and take the time to read everything out loud to catch grammatical errors you may have made.
- Check your deliverable solves the problem at hand: Sometimes we get carried away when we are deep in a project. Before submitting anything, ask yourself if what you are about to submit either solves the problem at hand or fulfills the tasks you were assigned to do.
- Provide supporting evidence: If you are making a claim or recommendation, always make sure to back it up with data or a reliable source. It strengthens your case and adds credibility.
6. Maintain good personal health
Poor personal health has the ability to bleed into the workplace and create a negative environment for everyone. To improve your work performance immediately, follow the below simple practices to ensure your health is in tip top shape.
- Sleep enough: You should aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
- Avoid drinking before big projects or meetings: Alcohol (and hangovers) impair your ability to think and act on your feet.
- Work-life balance: Taking time away from work is critical for recharge and rest.
- Hydrate: Make sure to drink plenty of water throughout the day so you don’t become dehydrated.
- Exercise: Studies have shown that people who regularly exercise have improved moods and energy levels.
7. Avoid burnout
To improve your work performance immediately, you need to ensure that you are not nearing burnout and taking on too many tasks.
Define your role clearly
Clearly define the role and responsibility of your role, and the scope of projects and initiatives you will take on. Make sure to communicate this with your boss and cross-functional teams to ensure no one crosses the line.
Learn to say no
It is perfectly okay to say ‘no’ to a task that falls outside of your expertise or scope. In fact, agreeing to a task that is not appropriate could end up tarnishing your brand if you don’t have the time to complete it or the expertise to lead it.
Set up a strong support system
If you are consistently asked to go above and beyond in your role or take on tasks that are clearly outside of your scope, it’s important for you to have a strong support system in place that can help you push back. Usually, this is the role of a lead / manager, but if your manager is the one giving you too much work, consider going above them. Whoever leads the team will appreciate you coming to them and doing what is right for the greater good of the organization.
8. Ask for feedback and taking action
It may seem really obvious, but another great way to improve work performance immediately is to just ask for more feedback! This way, you aren’t guessing at the areas where you need to improve and instead you are being strategic about where you allocate time to improve.
Seek out constructive feedback & display a growth mindset
You can’t grow if you don’t get feedback. Make sure to schedule time with your lead or manager to discuss your performance. Go into your meetings with prepared questions around ‘how you can improve in area X’ or ‘what skills you should focus on developing next’. This will not only show that you have a growth mindset and a desire to evolve at the company, but it will also ensure that you are spending your time focusing on the things that your boss cares about. Always remember to take notes and document improvement along the way.
Seek mentorship and/or other learning opportunities
If you notice that you do have a skill gap, it’s a good idea to seek out mentorship or additional training on the subject. This could be done through formal courses (like on Udemy or Coursera) or through additional on-the-job learning (like raising your hand to support on a project where the skillset is leveraged and you can watch others who have mastered it).
9. Reflect and learn
This step is oftentimes overlooked, but it’s so critical to ensuring that you are growing and improving in your role.
Celebrate wins
At the end of each week, make sure you take a moment to celebrate your wins and successful. Reflect on what went well and pat yourself on the back for good work. This positive reinforcement is good for learning, but also personal morale.
Learn from mistakes
Mistakes are inevitable, but they’re also really valuable learning opportunities. When things don’t go as planned, review what went wrong and think through the ways you would improve next time.
Focus on small, continuous improvement over time
Seek to get only 1% better each day. This way, it’s not so overwhelming, and you can focus on small, more manageable improvements that will surely add up over time.
Conclusion
If you are struggling at work and want to improve your work performance immediately, there are tons of simple ways you can take back control and get back on the right path. By focusing on organization, prioritization, strong communication, personal health, and reflection, you will start to see drastic improvements in your day to day. Just remember that consistency is key – you’ll need to practice these strategies daily if you want to see improvement. Good luck!
If you liked this article, be sure to check out our other similar article on simple tips to survive a job you hate.
