How to improve your professional performance?

Leaving the role of intern and junior analyst to take on more strategic and complex tasks necessarily requires a look at your professional performance. But what would that be?

Professional performance is a type of monitoring for you to see if you are achieving your professional goals , delivering your tasks on time and with satisfaction. In short, it is an x-ray of your performance at work.

And how do you know if you are doing well at your job or not? What can you do to improve your performance and how important is it to monitor and implement new actions based on the feedback collected? These are some of the questions we will answer throughout this post.

The importance of professional performance and its impact on your career

One of the most important factors that positively impact your career is achieving goals, right? But to get there, you will need to perform well professionally. Do you want to see it alone?

Imagine that you work in the sales area . In this scenario, a successful professional meets deadlines, makes sales and consolidates the brand of the organization in which he works through positive interactions inside and outside the company.

On the other hand, if you don't perform effectively, deadlines are missed, sales volume is low and consumers feel that the company is indifferent to their needs and look for help elsewhere.

Given this importance of professional performance, whether in the employee's career or in the direct impact on the company's productivity and sales, performance evaluation was created. It is a mechanism that classifies employee performance and scores improvements if unsatisfactory performance is identified.

What is a high performance professional?

A high-performance professional is one who exceeds goals and engages the team to achieve their individual and group objectives. Also called high potentials, a term used in the English language, these individuals are instigated by challenges, as soon as they overcome a goal they want to overcome others in the sequence.

Here are some characteristics that high performers have in common:

• high quality deliveries;
• constant development of new skills;
• not afraid to decide;
• constantly request feedback;
• are able to self-manage ;
• they are flexible and resilient, they do not let themselves be overwhelmed by
• changes in scenery or pressure;
• They have excellent interpersonal skills and are skilled in communication.

How to identify areas for improvement in your professional performance?

The best tool for you to understand your strengths and weaknesses and to become a high-performance professional is to create and monitor your individual development plan (PDI) . With the establishment of the PDI you will be able to identify:

• need for new technical and behavioral skills;
• improve skills you already have;
• define short, medium and long-term goals;
• measure the success of goals;
• create goals that are connected to your life purpose;
• plan your career growth and development.

Furthermore, frequently request feedback from co-workers, superiors and even customers about your performance. This information will be relevant for you to understand yourself and have a more objective view of your strengths and weaknesses that should be worked on in your individual development plan.

5 tips to improve professional performance

In addition to creating your PDI and requesting feedback , there are some tips and tricks you can use to improve your professional performance. Below we list 5 of them:

Limit distractions

Colleagues who talk too much, email and WhatsApp notifications that keep arriving on your cell phone, television sounds when you're in the home office. These are some frequent workplace distractions that end up sabotaging your efforts to improve work performance.

It's important to keep these distractions under control as they directly affect your productivity and focus, which in turn leads to late tasks and projects.

Plan and prioritize

Many people spend a significant amount of their time on irrelevant or low-priority tasks. What happens in this scenario? There is little time left for these professionals to focus on more relevant and strategic tasks that can launch their careers.

These are some simple workplace habits and time management tips that help you get things done on time and improve your overall work performance.

Delegate tasks whenever possible

Intelligent task delegation is one of the most relevant skills for professionals looking for high performance. Why?

It helps you lighten your workload and focus on other activities that are more relevant to your career. So, if you are overwhelmed and can ask for help from coworkers, don't let pride get the best of you, raise your hand and ask for that help.

Find a correlation between personal and professional goals

To stay motivated in the long term, you need to find satisfaction in your work life. That's right, finding a correlation between your personal and professional goals will make all the difference in improving your performance at work. Want to see how?

Let's say you're a sustainability activist. He doesn't like to see food waste or the indiscriminate use of plastic bags. In this scenario, working in an organization that has healthy environmental practices would bring a direct connection between your professional and personal goals, which would help you improve your job satisfaction.

However, if you worked in a company without sustainability policies, which is not concerned with CO2 emissions or regular waste disposal, there would probably be a clash between personal and professional objectives. Your working day would be much more difficult, as you would indirectly be hurting your purposes by working in an organization with these harmful practices.

6 strategies to increase productivity and efficiency at work

In addition to the tips we highlighted in the previous topic, how about also developing some strategies to overcome your fears and start increasing your productivity today? Here we go!

1. Don't procrastinate

You know that desire to leave things for later? Well, it is the worst enemy of productivity. Always keep that saying in mind: don't leave until tomorrow what could be done today.

2. Manage your time properly

In addition to avoiding procrastination , it is essential to manage production time and the priority order of tasks. This involves identifying the most important activities to be carried out initially and communicating to managers and others involved a precise deadline for completing each of them.

3. Become more organized

Organization is the key to efficiency. Keep your desk, email, and devices well organized to make it easier to access tasks. Store files with clear names and keep useful objects close to the computer. Agility in searching for files and apps saves valuable time.

4. Improve communication skills

Whether you are working in a team or alone, communication is essential to overall performance and project success. You must be able to let others know what you need and understand what they need from you.

5. Continuous learning and search for self-development

As you will see when setting up your PDI, the continuous search for new knowledge and self-development will be a constant in your professional life. Why?

The job and business market is fickle, from one year to the next a lot can have changed, therefore, you will need to understand these changes and absorb them through new knowledge and even self-development, asking for feedback from your networking network .

6. Balance personal and professional life

That's right, there's no way you can progress at work if there are problems in your personal life. It is no coincidence that when building your PDI to progress in your career, you must take personal aspirations and purposes into account.

Another strategy to find this balance is to leave work problems after work. No more reading emails or WhatsApp notifications from work after your work hours end.