Three ways to provide value at work
Three very simple techniques to put you ahead of the crowd in any workplace
Do your job — well
I’ve worked in places where just showing up to work at all put you ahead of the crowd, but doing your job and doing it well definitely put you ahead — in pretty much any workplace.
At the worst it will put you with the “productive crowd” that likes to work for a living.
Here are some steps to doing your job well:
- Show up each day unless something really stops you from doing so. No excuses.
- Learn as much as you can about the work from your boss / co-workers / predecessor.
- Do the things that need to be done as soon as possible, don’t wait until the last minute.
- Be friendly and respectful 99% of the time. When the time to become disrespectful comes you’ll know it. Also: Be actively friendly rather than just passively. Example: Start emails by thanking them for reporting an error rather than just saying you fixed it. The best you can do is to make others feel good about their work.
- Learn more than you can from those around you. Tutorials, courses, congresses, experimenting. Do it on your own time if need be, that goes a long way.
- Innovate when you can do it yourself or propose innovation when you need help from others.
Do your job — without being told
This is one of the things that usually take time before others realize, but then they will value you even higher for it. A boss who can focus on his own stuff instead of micro-managing you has a couple hours more each week — hours that he doesn’t have to worry about stuff he shouldn’t have to worry about in the first place.
The first time I ever realized this was when I was working on a farm during a summer job. I got a lot out of that experience, but one of the most interesting was how much of a difference I as a single person made during my time there.
We were cutting plant roots into individual pieces (don’t ask) and about every other hour we would need someone to bring us a refill with a front-loader. That was the farmer’s job and one time he was stuck in traffic and couldn’t make it back in time — so I called him and he walked me through the levers and using the thing.
From that day onward I was “promoted” to front-loader-guy and eventually I would be called for all kinds of things and taught new stuff. We saw less and less of the farmer who could spend the whole days driving between his different fields and taking care of them — all thanks to me taking one stupidly simple task off his hands. And I was like sixteen or so years old and there would have been twenty other guys who could have stepped up to this task — a fun one I might add.
Do your job — and motivate others to follow
This is the last step that truly makes a difference, you can only improve so much yourself but if you can motivate those around you the whole team becomes more productive and happier. There’s two ways your reputation can go when you follow this path: The over-achiever other people secretly dislike or the motivated guy who drags other people with him.
Both versions are valuable to have in a team, but the latter definitely has the edge when it comes to overall use.
Here are some ways to achieve that:
- Talk about your work with dedication. If you lay bricks talk about how you managed a new personal record, if you write code talk about that one error that took forever to fix but will save hours in the long run. But don’t brag, instead let people know how much you enjoyed this piece of work and the success that came with it.
- Challenge others — in a fun way. You’d be surprised how much fun a simple “I bet you five bucks” creates. I actually did that a couple times, trying to get people to spot a really hidden error in my code I had just found myself. Suddenly you have five guys downloading your GIT repository and digging through code they would never touch otherwise. And we all know to avoid this particular trap in the future.
- Outperform them, but slightly. This is highly dependent on the type of people you work with but if they are already motivated to a degree they might work a little harder trying to keep up. But it sucks if you are twice as productive and make them feel it.
- Put the team before your personal aspiration. Write “we fixed the error” when communicating with people outside your team and things like that. Sounds small, but believe me it makes a difference. Or back on the farm we each had our own buckets, but at the end of the day we would look at how many tons we had cut up together. Small, but important.
And the best thing: You can start with all these steps tomorrow and no one can stop you from it.
To me it feels that a lack of power to change things is the easiest way to kill someone’s motivation — but if you follow this line of thinking this perceived lack of power will disappear because you are actually doing something to better yourself, the team and the company.
And that’s hard to take away.
This is part of the reason why I can continue to exist and enjoy my time at a company that in recent months has been on a strong decline. Times are hard, but I still go to work as a happy man and enjoy my time with some great colleagues — and I continue to put in the work that might not matter this time next year.
I hope you found this post useful, I did my best to make it worth reading and if I succeeded there’s some more you could read:
