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What are the most important qualities of agood employee?
Always being on time?
Getting along with your teammates?
Paying attention to even the minute details of every task?
Doing more work than your colleagues and doing it exceptionally well?
One Redditor started to question what qualities managers look for in employees after a not-so-pleasant experience.
The netizen recounted how the company let go of one colleague despite him beingsuper efficientand good at his job.
The OP wondered if the coworker fell victim to the companys bias against less talkative and expressive employees.
Read on and find out the entire story below.
Its performative productivity trying to appear busy while hardly doing any work.
Other experts also call this productivity theater, emphasizing the performative nature of this phenomenon.
What tasks are performative work?
Attending unnecessary meetings or spending excessive time on administrative tasks can be examples.
Corporate environments arent the only places where we can see performative productivity.
People posting about their accomplishments on social media is also a great example.
Quiet quitting can be the so-called sibling of performative productivity.
The former is employees doing the bare minimum because they dont get incentives for extra effort.
The latter is what then follows in a logical sequence.
If Im not rewarded for doing extra work, pretending to do it should suffice, right?
The Danger Of Obsessing Over Productivitypodcast host Chris Williamson made an observation in one of the episodes.
Youre genuinely disincentivized to be efficient.
83% of their respondents admit to engaging in at least one performative work behavior.
People feel the pressure to appear busy at work.
The reasons employees do that vary.
Around a third of the surveys respondents claim they do those tasks first that will make them visible.
49% wanted the company to see them as valuable.
Performance tracking software, of course, heightens this performativity.
Workers believe its important for their careers to seem to be productive.
And its easy to understand such logic productivity is perception, after all.
While its true that perception might be reality, she doesnt recommend creating theillusion that youre working.
Its important to let your work shine, she writes.
Her first piece of advice to get noticed is to do actual good work.
She writes that first and foremost, it might make you respect yourself more.
Youll have a greater sense of meaning and confidence, knowing youre putting your best efforts forward.
Actively seeking out important tasks and projects lets the management know you take your position seriously.
Fostering strong relationships with colleagues is also important.
A team player will always be more noticeable.
Build connections, seek mentors and ask for feedback from colleagues.
Strong social capital provides you with opportunities to help others and to ask for help, Bower writes.
