If you’re going to be a model employee, you need to develop certain habits. That’s true regardless of your niche and eventual goals. As a worker, you can stand apart from the other employees in a good way if you think about how you’re going to behave when you go into the office each day.
We’ve selected some of the best worker habits you can have if you’re going to boost your career in 2021. Let’s go over each one in detail.
Be a Vault Concerning Sensitive Information
When you come into work each day, you’ll probably overhear plenty of private conversations. Those might be about what intranet features your company’s exclusive software suite has, or maybe you hear about a new acquisition or takeover that’s about to occur. You might even learn that your boss is about to take the company public, and an IPO is in the works shortly.
Regardless of what you hear, you need to become an information repository from which nothing escapes. You have to earn coworker trust. Your bosses need to know they can talk about anything in front of you, and there’s no danger of you leaking that information to the press, a competitor, or even to someone on the next stool over at your local bar.
If you’re going to be a stand-up employee, you need to prove over and over that your superiors can trust you. That’s one way they’ll start to hold you in higher regard.
Ask for Advice at Appropriate Moments
Asking your bosses for advice might almost seem counterintuitive. You might think the smarter strategy is just to act like you know what to do at all times and dive into any project or assignment with no preamble.
However, many bosses like it if you ask a couple of relevant questions before beginning an assignment. They don’t want you asking them things all day since that will make it seem like you’re wasting time, but if you have one or two queries about how best to go about a project, they’ll like the fact that you’re detail-oriented.
The trick is knowing when to ask those questions and when to start a project immediately. If what to do is very obvious, don’t bother asking, or you’ll appear like you’re unfit for the job.
Use Body Language to Project Confidence
You should show up looking like you know what you’re doing. That means smiling, walking tall, and using a tone of voice that says you’re in the right place at all times.
If you speak quietly, don’t make eye contact, or never say anything, that’s going to send the wrong message in almost all circumstances. The only time you can probably get away with that is if you work from home or you work in an isolated environment like an IT department where almost no human interaction is necessary.
At any job where you need to speak to people often, try to demonstrate and project that you’re the right person for the assignment. Nonverbal elements say a lot more than you might imagine, and your bosses generally notice what you do with your hands, eyes, voice, and so forth.
Don’t Complain
You might have heard about the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but if you squeak too much at work, you can probably expect a pink slip. Sometimes you have to object to something that makes no sense, but try to go with the flow as much as possible.
Try to eliminate the word “can’t” from your vocabulary. If you feel like you are not able to do something the way your superiors told you to do it, suggest an alternate method instead of immediately telling them that it’s impossible.
Try to be a problem solver. Anything you can do to minimize the workload is always going to benefit you. If you have to vent, wait till you’re at home or over at a friend’s house to talk about any workplace frustrations you have.
Try to Solve Problems Rather than Just Identifying Them
You can probably find problems with the way any business operates, but you should try to discover solutions instead of just pointing them out. This will demonstrate that you can lead, and your superiors will think about you when the time comes to promote from within the company.
Any time you come to your boss with an issue, try to have a viable solution ready as well.
