Workplace behaviour is about how employees act and interact while working. It includes how they communicate, work together, and respond to different circumstances and developments.
There are two types of workplace behaviour: positive and negative. Positive work behaviours make for a better workplace, whilst negative behaviours make for a worse one. Each workplace behaviour is impacted by an employee’s personality traits, which, with the proper support, education and implementation plan, can be encouraged by employers for a more positive work environment.
This article will cover:
- What is work behaviour?
- Examples of positive work behaviours
- Examples of negative work behaviours
- How personality traits affect an employee’s work behaviour
- How to implement positive work behaviours in your business
What is work behaviour?
Work behaviour is the sum of all the actions employees make when working in any professional capacity and can be measured on both an individual and holistic basis. Unlike other things in the workplace, such as productivity, which can be tangibly measured, work behaviour is the sum of both tangible (sometimes called “observable”) conduct, such as reliability, and intangible (sometimes called “invisible”) conduct, such as emotional intelligence.
The work behaviours of your employees and teams collectively contribute to your company's atmosphere, affecting factors like productivity. There are positive and negative work behaviours that enhance and diminish your company's working environment, respectively. Generally, the more positive work behaviours your employees and teams possess, the better the working environment.
Whilst there are hundreds of examples of positive work behaviours, by far the most important and common behaviours are:
Pride
Pride is about striving to do the best job possible, be the best team member you can be, go above and beyond for a customer or client, and produce the best quality work possible. Every day. Every time.
Passion
Something that often comes with and from pride is passion. Passion is about having a deep enthusiasm for both the job and work you do, as well as the industry you work in, often grounded in some form of emotional or psychological connection to it.
Leadership
Leadership is more than just leading people; it's about fostering a culture of collaboration and being able to self-motivate and motivate others.
Work ethic
Work ethic is the overall attitude, approach and dedication to tasks. It involves putting in the required time and effort for the best outcome.
Teamwork
Teamwork is how open your employees and teams are to working side-by-side with each other to achieve a common aim cohesively.
Professionalism
Everybody in the workplace, no matter how senior, should exude professionalism, from how they dress and communicate, verbally and non-verbally, to how they conduct themselves with coworkers, customers and clients.
Reliability
Reliability is how consistent and dependable an employee is when performing the tasks, responsibilities and other commitments assigned to them.
Effective communication
Being able to communicate effectively isn’t just about being able to tell your teammates about something or what to do, but ensuring that the information you share is both valuable and memorable, disseminated in a way they can understand.
Communication can be in person or through online messaging and video-based platforms like Skype, Slack and Zoom.
Accountability
Accountability works both ways. It’s about taking responsibility for what you’ve done, good and bad, and holding your fellow teammates and managers to the same without throwing the blame.
Emotional intelligence
Your colleagues and employees’ personal circumstances can often affect their behaviour at work. Emotional intelligence helps you read their anger, sadness, joy, or whatever emotion they are feeling and respond accordingly. Understanding if they do something out of the ordinary is helpful for better communication.
Flexibility
Flexibility refers to your employees’ reception to a change in circumstance and, more accurately, their willingness and ability to adapt to those changes.
Creativity
To stay relevant in your industry, you must continue to innovate. Creativity is your employees’ ability to develop their own ideas, solutions and processes and improve pre-existing ones.
Taking the initiative
When circumstances change, so must the company and the employees within it. Taking the initiative is about changing those circumstances before being asked to improve the outcome for all parties involved.
Motivation
The drive employees have to take and complete the tasks assigned to them to a high standard and actively contribute to the overall work environment.
Persistence
Often a result of strong motivation, persistence is continuing to do something, be that gaining new skills, new knowledge, helping others, or trying to innovate or revolutionise something, in the face of strong opposition or challenges.
Respect
Respect is how considerate and courteous employees are to their teammates, subordinates, superiors, clients and others (e.g. third-party consultants and suppliers) in a professional and dignified way.
Self-improvement
No one is perfect. Self-improvement is having the self-awareness to realise this and actively take steps to become better at what you aren’t as good at, for example, communication, teamwork or just your knowledge of your job and industry.
Collaboration
Very few jobs can be done by only one employee. Rather, they are done in a team that fits the big picture. Collaboration is being open to this, open to sharing your ideas, and seeking others’ input on them.
Examples of negative behaviour in the workplace
On the other hand, inappropriate workplace behaviour makes for a hostile work environment. Examples of this type of problematic behaviour are:
Pessimism
Pessimism refers to the exuding of a defeatist or generally negative attitude by those in a workplace, focusing on the negatives, expecting the worst outcome of every situation and expressing a lack of confidence in the ability of yourself and others.
Tardiness
Tardiness is being late for work, meetings, deadlines and returning from breaks without a valid reason and proper notification. This slows down work schedules and harms productivity and overall employee performance.
Disrespect
Disrespect is the actions, words, or overall attitudes an employee or employer has that show a lack of consideration, common courtesy and regard for other people they work with and the clients or customers they serve.
Aggression and bullying
Whilst often grounds for dismissal, bullying and other forms of aggression are inappropriate behaviour. They negatively impact the company by fostering resentment and negatively impacting the relationship between managers, employers and employees.
Resistance
Resistance can take many forms but is generally displayed in response to some sort of change or challenge that takes the individual out of their comfort zone. This could be resistance to change coming from new ideas; resistance to taking on new responsibilities or to self-improvement; resistance to taking responsibility for your actions, or to going the extra mile for a client or customer.
Most common personality traits and how they affect behaviour
Your employee’s work behaviour is often linked to their personality. Some personalities exude more positive behaviours, while others exude negative ones. Consensus amongst a number of studies in psychology is that there are five broad traits that shape an individual’s personality.
Extraversion
Extraversion measures how outgoing and sociable an employee is. It is often characterised by how talkative and energetic they are regarding any form of social interaction, typically in person. Employees scoring high in extraversion often excel in teamwork and collaboration, where their energy and passion for human interaction often make them naturally suited to leadership or go-betweens for different teams working on projects in parallel.
Conversely, employees scoring low in extraversion are more focused on self-improvement, as they constantly analyse themselves and their actions throughout the day, thus striving to improve themselves, their skills, and their overall work environment.
Agreeableness
Agreeableness is the level of compassion, cooperativeness and consideration when dealing with others, their views and ideas. Those with are highly agreeable are generally well-liked by colleagues, superiors and subordinates alike by putting other people’s needs before their own. They tend to score highly in things like emotional intelligence, self-improvement and the coaching of others.
By the same token, those people with low levels of agreeableness are often prone to disrespect and aggression, intentionally or unintentionally, because they are unable to accept others’ ways of thinking.
Openness
Openness is all about how accepting an employee is to something new. This could be a new idea, a new process, a new way of doing things within the organisation and seeking out new experiences or environments wholly different to their own. Open-minded employees are typically quite creative, coming up with innovations or trying out new ones to compare them to old ones, simply to see which is better, and implement that one, typically taking some form of leadership position (officially or unofficially) in the process.
On the other hand, less open-minded people are generally more resistant to change of any kind, no matter how big or small, refusing to accept that there may be a better way of doing things despite all the evidence.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is often linked to awareness - awareness for themselves and awareness for the things around them. Employees with high levels of conscientiousness are often detail-oriented, constantly striving to do the best job possible, no matter how big or small, going the extra mile for a client or customer before even being asked, making them highly reliable in the process.
Employees lacking conscientiousness often lack motivation. This means they’re more inclined to procrastinate, becoming disorganised and somewhat combative when challenged.
Neuroticism
Neuroticism is the extent to which employees experience negative emotions, stress, emotional instability and other forms of psychological distress. Those who are highly neurotic can often be prone to pessimism, leading to a perceived lack of motivation (which may not always be the case in reality).
Being highly neurotic, however, is not entirely bad. Highly neurotic individuals often possess a refined view of their and their team’s ability, allowing them to give their colleagues new ideas a reality check to avoid them overextending themselves.
To recap, the five most common personality traits are:
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Neuroticism
How to improve your team’s behaviour
No matter how big your team or organisation is, every employer in Australia can benefit from improving their team’s behaviour.
Take a step back
The first step to improving your team’s work behaviours is to avoid getting right into it, no matter how tempting. Instead, you should take a step back and evaluate your workplace.
This can be done in many ways, but the most common way is through an anonymous employee survey, asking about their views on the company culture and opinions on management. By making it anonymous, employees should feel more comfortable sharing their truth, allowing you to get a more accurate image of your company from managers and workers. You can then compare this to how you, as the boss, view the company, highlighting areas of significant diversion.
Address it individually
Work behaviours are inherently individualistic, so there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. Instead, you’ll need to address each of your employee’s work behaviours one at a time.
Your first port of call should be to discuss each employee’s positive and negative behaviours with their manager, thus helping you to gain an insight into which employees have which positive and negative behaviours you’ll need to promote or reduce.
However, a manager’s view is only one side of the story. You may benefit from discussing your employee’s perspectives with them in person, asking them about positive behaviours (such as how motivated they feel on a typical day) and negative behaviours (such as tardiness).
Such a conversation may not always work, so a survey discussing the same may be preferable. Response consistency check questions should be added to avoid social desirability. When combined, this should give you an idea of what negative behaviours you need to train out of which employees and which positive behaviours you need to encourage.
This can be done in-house by yourself and managers or by third-party training providers such as UTS, who have dedicated corporate training programs employers can use to give their employees new skills, including positive work behaviours like leadership.
Look at yourself
While evaluating your employees’ positive and negative work behaviours, it’s essential not to forget to look at yourself. Though you may not like to think about it, your management style often plays a massive role in your employees’ positive and negative work behaviours.
For example, if one of your employees is already unmotivated, taking a confrontational approach to dealing with them will unlikely improve their motivation. Instead, you may need to use more emotional intelligence to empathise with why they are unmotivated, e.g. a difficult home life meaning they aren’t sleeping enough.
Likewise, your management style may inadvertently limit your team’s positive work behaviours. For example, micromanaging everything your employees do may restrict their ability to take the initiative, collaboration and overall leadership skills. By looking inward and altering your management style, you should be able to stoke your team’s positive work behaviours and limit their negative ones.
Be patient
Improving your team’s behaviour by addressing your employees’ individual positive and negative work behaviours will not be an overnight fix. More accurately, it may take many months for your team's behaviours to improve noticeably, regardless of whether you choose to do it in-house or use an outside training provider.
Though there may be some regression in the short term, improving your team’s behaviour will be an investment that pays dividends well into the future. Ultimately, you may need to bring in new team members, not just train your existing employees, to improve your workplace behaviour.
Get in touch with Plus UTS to find out how to encourage positive workplace behaviour and transform your organisation for the future.
