22 Ways To Show A Strong Work Ethic To Your Employees In Experts View

Employees’ work ethic is directly proportional to their productivity and efficiency. You can develop good work ethic in your employees with proper guidance and encouragement. Sometimes you don’t have clear objectives that is why it is difficult to know where to emphasize. Here we are going to discuss the most important ways to show strong work ethic to your employees.

What Is Work Ethic

A finite set of moral principles used by an employee in his/her job is called work ethic. It includes different traits like responsibility, quality consideration, teamwork and discipline during the duty, professionalism towards the job, determination for the job, respectfulness, character, cooperation with your colleagues and tries to increase the productivity.

Definition Of Work Ethic

Work ethic is an attitude or state of mind of individual employee that performs job duties at the work place with high moral standards. It is actually the ability to maintain a set of moral values at the workplace.

Meaning Of The Work Ethic

Work ethic is a soft skill and it is transferable from one person to another.  You can take work ethic as an attitude that makes an employee more determined to his/her duties at the workplace. You can include some words to describe work ethic those are discipline, responsibility, high quality, teamwork, hard work etc.

Positive work ethic develops a sense to know that what is good and what is bad for the organization. With his/her moral values and principles, an individual employee starts work for growth of the organization. To develop hard work ethic companies should train the employees time to time by organizing work ethic workshops.

Every individual comes from different background, different attitude and different beliefs regarding various subjects. For building good work ethic, an organization or company must take care of about the given guidelines in the workshops. Beliefs and principles of the founder of the company, reflects in those guidelines.

Example Of Good Work Ethic –

If you want to know the concept of work ethic with some more illustration, here we take an example. Goldwin Shoes Company is a shoe manufacturer company. This company known for its good work ethics and currently it supplies shoes to more than thousand stores across the country.

Five core values are the five pillars behind the success of this shoe making company. Time to time they promote these five core values among its employees to ensure that their companies’ culture is delivered to each of its employee. These five core values are responsibility, punctuality, productivity, honesty and transparency.

Mr. MacManus, founder of the Goldwin Shoes Company, is retired from military. He was a physical trainer for marine soldiers. He acquired these five core values from his that passionate job. Now he is trying to apply his experience of service in his company. It is the main reason behind the success of this company.

1. To Encourage Good Work Ethic, Provide Good Working Environment

CEO, Idea Grove, Scott Bara dell

In the present time, you cannot expect good work ethic from an individual or your employees’ team. However, you can create a healthy work environment at your work place or in your company where people want to become more productive and enjoy their work. Once an employee starts enjoying the work his performance automatically gets better.

You can encourage people by each other’s example and develop healthy competition among them. Realize them that they are not working for your company, they are working for their own company. Growth of the company is the growth of every individual. Help your employees with your experience to achieve company goals and targets. You can offer perks and incentives to your employees time to time.

2. Start A Movement Through A Moment

Marketing Manager, CPG Agency, Peter Cartier

You have to bring your team or your employees together in a meaningful manner so that you can make some crucial changes in their attitude and increase their professional and personal growth. In this digital era, face-to-face contact is so rare but this thing has its own impact. You can organize annual business meetings to engage your staff with your ideas and convey them your message.

You have to bring your team or your employees together in a meaningful manner so that you can make some crucial changes in their attitude and increase their professional and personal growth. In this digital era, face-to-face contact is so rare but this thing has its own impact. You can organize annual business meetings to engage your staff with your ideas and convey them your message.

Direct contact with your employees or project team established an active conversation with them. Same thing cannot be happened with the digital media like emails, phone calls even video conferencing. CPG Agency using the same tactics to solve its employees’ problems.

3. Delete Weak Words From Your Business Dictionary

CEO and Founder, Petra Coach, Andy Bailey

You have to delete every weak word like “attempt” or “try”. These weak words are not included in the good work ethics. Actually they make a soft dead line with these weak words like “As soon as possible” or “soon” and get some room for margin of error.

It is a challenging task to develop the habit in your employees to use strong and promising words instead of weak words. Generally, people use weak words like “try” or “attempt” as their comfort. They avoid to take responsibility. Accountability of an individual suffers because of these weak words.

If you want to improve company work ethic than you, should start replacing weak words with strong words like “EOD” or “EOW” to give accurate deadlines instead of soft deadlines. One should use “I will” instead of “try”. Therefore, to develop a good work ethic, start a new tradition to use strong words instead of weak words during the business conversation

4. Maintain Transparency At The Workplace

COO, Enhancy, Velina Getova

In our company we use bottom-up approach for budget planning and it is a best example to maintain transparency. Opinion of every employee is important for us. Here we take ideas from every employee, during the budget planning and ask them that how much they need to get their desired goals and target.

Our budget includes money for different things like courses, tools or any other thing that is necessary for any member of project team to achieve their professional and personal goals or target. Here we organize bi-monthly meetings where our CEO communicate with the other staff and update them with their valuable learning.

5. Set Your Daily Priorities Clearly

CEO, KNF&T Staffing Resources, Beth Tucker

Train your employee about the task urgency. Help them to recognize that which task is important and which can be pending for some time. You can suggest your employee to maintain to do list.

This kind of to do list always setting your priorities. This practice makes your daily cause list well maintained. It is an essential part of good work ethic.

6. Motivate Your Team To Work Smart, Not Hard

Global Executive Director and HR Expert, Robert Half Finance & Accounting, Steve Saah

Staying long time at the work place doesn’t mean that you are more productive. Work smartly is also a part of good work ethic. Working more than capacity actually harms your accuracy. To avoid these silly mistakes you have to work smart than work hard.

Effective time management is the key for work smart. You should encourage your employee to get their target smartly. If there is a need of any resources, you have to provide them to your staff. You can provide training and use of technology for your employees.

7. Start From The Beginning

Director of People Strategy, Helpside, Amber Hunter

Good work ethics should be start from the joining of an employee. You should take care of it during the hiring process. Include some questions about the work ethic in interviews. If an employee says that he will work hard for the company then you should ask what it means. He can complete the work in how much time?

Some time ago, one of my employees has gone on unexpected medical leave. I was looking for a part time employee. One of employees recommended his elder sister, who just got married. I got here resume in some time and arrange a personal interview with her. She quit her honeymoon and joined the company. Now because of her this kind of seriousness about the work, now she is one of the best employees of my company.

8. Buy And Provide Lunch For Your Employees

CEO & Co-Founder, eMazzanti Technologies, Jennifer Mazzanti

Our company is an IT company. It is unexpected to get a bulge in our call volume. During the lunch time we have a huge shortage of responding staff for a call because staff leave the office building during the lunch time. Sometimes they take more time than they have allotted for the lunch.

To resolve the above problem we started a new tradition to buy the lunch for our employees. One person take the order from the employees’ table and get the lunch for them from the nearby restaurants then deliver it to the every employee’s table directly. Our employees are with this idea and availability of the staff increases at the mid-day calls.

Using this little effort now, we are at the higher level of customer satisfaction just because of increasing good work ethic inside the company.

9. Understand That Everyone Has Its Own Size And One Size Not For All-

Managing Director of HR, Actualize Consulting, Kerry Wekelo

If you want to become a successful employer, you should know how to utilize your different assets according to their best-fit position. The best employer knows that which task should be assigned to which employee because someone is good to deal with customers and some other one is good to perform task during the development cycle of a particular product.

Assigning task according to their expertise, make your employees more productive. If an individual focusing on his/her favourite task, it will more satisfying for her/his. This kind of practice is more productive and helps the company to achieve its goal and targets.

10. Give Regular Feedback To Your Staff

Productivity & ADHD Coach, Coaching ADDvantages, Lynne Edris

Providing time-to-time feedback to your employees is also necessary for making good work ethic environment at the work place. This feedback may be good as well as bad. Good feedback boosts up their moral whereas bad will make them thoughtful about their faults and mistakes during the project.

Real time feedbacks are more effective than feedback given after the completion of the project. Employees can change their approach with the help of real time feedback. Real time feedback allows to employees to adapt their behaviour, approach, actions and way of thinking.

11. Promote Healthy Life/Work Balance

CEO, TransPerfect Global, Philip Shawe

Work/Life balance is must for a focused and professional individual. A person cannot think about the work all the time. Some fun and entertainment should be there too for the healthy work/life balance. It also part of the good work ethic.

To stay focused, you have to get some regular breaks from your work and spend some time with your family. It will charge you and you can start work again with more potential.

12. Correlate You Purpose Of Business With Your Core Identity

Principal, Lean Project Consulting, Tom Richert

Our core identity is to bring quality in life at the work place as well as outside the work place. You should encourage your employees to work together with harmony and togetherness.

To engage work with full energy you have to correlate purpose of the business with the identity of your organization. A business can perform better in terms of income, revenue and growth if it concerns the development of employees, clients and the whole community.

13. Start A Reward System For Your Employees

VP of Human Resources, Jive Communications, Paul Thatcher

Reward System is a good way for motivation of your employees and improves work ethics at your organization. In general, monetary system is the most motivational system you can give bonus to your employee. You can give bonus as a gift as well.

You should setup career path for your employees. You can discuss this path with your employees that how they can achieve more growth in their career. Nobody can give his/her best in a dead end job.

14. Set A Continuous Improvement Trend

Founder, Libby Gill and Company, Libby Gill

First of all you have to promote attitude like “we are doing good but we can do better” This attitude encourages your employees to contribute and suggestions for the improvement of the origination. Organization culture should be in ongoing improvement stage.

You have to provide an environment in which people should accept that change is good. You have courage to accept new things doesn’t matter you are doing good at present. You should represent yourself as role model for your team and show them your good work ethics.

15. Reward Enthusiasm And Acknowledge

HR Consultant, Anglo Liners, Steve Pritchard

Some people do their job and nothing else. This type of employees, just do the assigned task. They don’t want to stretch their skills further because they thought that they have done that task which is assigned to them. This mind set is harmful for the organization. At other end some employees do some additional task along with their regular assigned work.

Now you have to differentiate between these two types of employees. Acknowledge the first one and setting some reward system for the second one. It will set an example in your company.

16. Keep Update Your Employees On Company Successes

Co-Founder & CMO, Tunedly, Mylene Besancon

Everyone wants to know the results of their hard work and same thing is applied for your employees. They want to know that their job is making difference in the progress of the company or not. It is not possible to share everything with each and every employee but it your duty to share annual progress with your employees. Whenever your organization achieves something extraordinary, you should share it with your team. It will motivate your employees.

Making this connection with your employees, motivate them to do more about the company because they know the result of their past efforts during his/her job. They can get some idea too from this sharing process for making their efforts better. If you will not engage your employees with the company’s success or victory, how will they decide to stay with your organization?

17. Condemn The Negative Behaviour Consciously At The Workplace

Founder & CEO, PostcardMania, Joy Gendusa

At our company, we have a strict policy that is “No Negative gossips” and “No Office Politics”. Our all employees are well aware with these policies. We mention this policy in hiring process as well.

It is a crucial part of good work ethics. You can make a video about it to so that your employees can understand easily about this strategy. If you prohibited negative things at your work place, your employees work in a light environment and become more productive.

18. Setting Milestones And Clear Goals

Owner/Founder, Docudavit, Sid Soil

There are many soft skills, which can make your business more successful. Good work ethic is one of them soft skills. Setting milestones and clear goals for your company is mandatory to promote strong work ethic at the workplace.

It is generally seen that employees don’t aware about the goals and milestones of the company. If your employees don’t have clear goals, they can’t perform better. You can set milestones for your employees to clear the project situations.

19. Set An Example

Talent Retention Strategist, Crescendo Strategies, Leah Brown

Setting a good example in front of the employees is most important thing for an employer. If you want to promote good work ethic in your company, you should be a role model for your employees. Good work ethic is not easy to maintain but if you are following the good work ethics than your employees do so.

Do all things whatever you expect from your employees. If you expect your employees come on time, you should come on time. If you expect your employees follow the rules, you should follow the rules. If you expect your employees tell the truth, you should tell the truth every time. You this kind of attitude make a huge impact on your organization’s work ethics. If you hear something negative, turn it by saying something positive and inspirational.

20. Provide Opportunity For Contribution To Your Employees

Principal, Value Transformation, Jon M. Quigley

Ideas, motivation and new things come from anywhere. Your employees can give a tremendous idea for the business. Provide the sharing environment for your employees.

Sharing the ideas and opinions is essential for the good work ethic. It improves the level of motivation and engagement among the staff.

21. Be A Teacher And Mentor

Founder and CEO, Crazy Pita Rotisserie & Grill Mehdi Zarhloul

If your employee don’t know the expectations from his/her, it is a discouragement for him/her. It is important for your business and your employee as well that you should clear with your expectations from your employee. You should give mentorship and training to your employee to clear their role for the company.

For good work ethic, it is necessary to become your employees’ mentor and prepare them to achieve the desired goal of your company. Time to time upgrade their skills by organizing training programs. Good employees never do wrong thing but they can loose focus. It is your responsibility to provide them a focused environment.

22. Explain To Your Employees Why, Not Just What

LMSW, HR Expert, From the Inside Out Project, Laura Macleod

If you have to change anything at the work place like protocols, staff, tasks, policies and responsibilities-explain to your employees with proper explanation.

Your employees should know about the reason behind this change otherwise they cannot work with their full confidence and potential. If you just impose your decision on your team then it will effect in a wrong way and your team can be paralyzed. It is most important thing to maintain the strong work ethic.