THE IDEAL EMPLOYEE,Sonal Srivastava

Sonal Srivastava wonders if reactive behaviour is a good idea if an employee feels he hasn't got his worth after putting in his best efforts:

When appraisal forms change hands once a year, your employer wants you to assess yourself and see how you have performed. Have you met your targets? Have you brought anything new to the table? Different companies have varied measures to assess their employees’ performance, and almost all of them now have a rigorous annual appraisal exercise. Key result areas or KRAs form the backbone of assessment, these are mostly used to define an employee’s field of action and whether he has been honestly able to deliver what was expected of him. Or is what he fills out laboriously in those endless columns, self-delusionary fiction?

Another set of skills, loosely termed as business behaviours, come in handy when you work in a team or are interacting with clients on a regular basis. Such is the importance of soft skills that John D Rockefeller reportedly said, “ I will pay more for the ability to deal with people than any other skill under the sun.” So, getting that elusive promotion or raise might not be all that simple. There is much that needs to be accounted for than just your skills on the job. If you managed to do it all, then great, but what do you do when you don’t get what you think you deserve?

Business Behaviors

Besides your core competency such as accounting or software engineering, you must also adopt behaviours that are conducive to the growth of the company, for, the organization is the macrocosm that reflects the aspirations of all those who make it work. You might be concentrating on pursuit of your individual goals but if they don’t match organization aspirations, you stand to lose. By defining ideal professional conduct, organizational  macrocosms create the space for individual ambition.

Positive Attitude

To practice perfect comportment conducive to the growth of the organization as well as the individual, an employee first needs to adopt a positive attitude. This includes spending office hours productively and at times going beyond the call of duty to meet stretch targets that generate profits as well as goodwill. That’s not all, you have to be friendly with your coworkers  and it’s always best to sort our differences if any, by talking about them as soon as they come up, instead of letting them simmer on the backburner.

Be Professional

Tash Hughes, a business communication professional says, “It doesn’t matter if you work for yourself or a boss; there are expectations that you will be professional in the course of business.” Professional behavior, according to Hughes, means punctuality, acceptance of constructive criticism and honesty in dealings and good manners. Let’s add to this list the need to respect deadlines: For what good is a piece of work if it is not delivered on time?

Office Etiquette

Your deportment and general behavior at the workplace and the manner in which you interact with colleagues don’t go unnoticed—even if these are not part of the form-filling exercise. Human resource managers and the person you report to are meant to keep a tab on your overall behavior at work and whether you use office time constructively.

However, what happens when despite putting your best foot forward, you don’t get the place in your organization that you think you deserve? For instance, you just may not get that promotion that you have been patiently waiting for, even after slogging for years.

Should we stop being good, if we are not rewarded appropriately? “That’s when you need to ask what is the purpose of good behavior”, says Anant Nadkarni, an expert on sustainable business practices. He explains that life is universal and it is present for its own sake. Similarly, good behavior is also there for its own sake. You don’t suddenly change your behavior if somebody behaves badly with you; you are what you are and you ought to carry on with your life without being affected by your circumstances. So, just be what you are whether you get that promotion or not.

“Ego is the individual platform that makes you feel suppressed,” says Nadkarni, adding that the best way to deal with that low feeling on receiving your appraisal letter is surrendering totally to the universal Self and being true to your individual self. “Just as there is a universal Self and an individual self, society and the corporation are linked, too. The company cannot manipulate the system. What will you achieve by not being good? Surgeon Shantanu Nagarkatti cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Theory of Flow—“You are in a state of flow when you are completely absorbed in the activity that you are doing—that is, being creatively involved with what you do for a living.” Nagarkatti says once you experience that, you won’t get bored whether you are rewarded for it or not.

Courtesy: The Speaking Tree,TOI,May 5,2013