Employee behaviour is essential to work productivity and performance. Good attitude is associated with happier clients, lower absenteeism, better teamwork, and healthier wellbeing. Meanwhile, bad behaviour is closely related to negative actions such as daydreaming, inefficiency, and absence in the workplace.
As important as it is, business leaders and HR team are urged to set a role model and influence employee behaviour at its best. But how? Affecting employees’ behaviour can be done from internal factors and external factors. Combining both factors will likely bring better results than applying just one. Without more ado, here are the internal and external ingredients to cultivate employees with good attitudes.
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Incentives, as discussed in our previous article, can be both internal and external factors that change employee’s behaviour. It can also create employee’s habits, help them break a bad habit, change behaviour, as well as help the organisation remove barriers between work and employees.
Work setting is considered as an external factor that influences employee’s behaviour. For instance, good lighting office is shown to be beneficial to improve an organisation’s performance through its productive workers. Lighting plays a crucial role in day-to-day business operations, especially for night shift projects. Demonstrating good lighting conditions that enhance non-task surface brightness and allowing personal control leads to better task performance and improved feelings of health and well-being, a study reported.
Ensuring the work environment always clean and well-kept is also an external factor to keep employees engaged. By working in a clean environment, employees could have more pride in their job compared to working in a building that looks old and shady.
Management style can be considered as external and internal factors that influence both emotional and psychological of staff. As an example, when a boss yells at an employee in front of his coworkers, he can both feel emotionally ashamed and psychologically disturbed. As a result, the said employee might continuously think of the problem which decreases his/her productivity.
On the contrary, a simple word of encouragement of taking five minutes two-way communication will make employees feel like they are not just another face in the workplace crowd, but a valued member of the company. When employees feel valued, they will bring the best they can. Their behaviour changes over time following the management style a leader uses to nurture them.
When employees step in the office door, they are expected to be professionals who can carry out responsibilities and solve challenges. However, it is easier said than done. Albeit professionalism is needed in carrying out work-life, humans are a complicated creature who is sometimes unable to separate between personal and professional issues, resulting in changed professional behaviour at work such as unable to attend a meeting or not mentally present in the office.
In this case, HR should understand that everyone has bad days. Yet, if employees cannot seem to snap out of the attitude towards those days, you should talk to them about their changes in behaviour. This will likely help them notice their new “attitude” that harms business operations. And if the said employees could not cope with it, offering them an employee assistance program is advisable.
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