Factors affecting Employee
performance
April 11,
2025
Introduction
For an
organization to achieve its goals and objectives, and to drive its workforce
towards its vision and mission, employee performance is a key factor. Though the
organizations may differ based on business domains, based on demography and
other factors, it is inevitable to mention that the people factor is key. Hence,
employee performance directly determines the success or the failure of an
organization.
Numerous attributes
of employees and the organization are associated for the improved performance
of employees of an organization. This article explores certain such attributes affecting
employee performance.
Factors
affecting employee performance
Among many
factors affecting employee performance, below are discussed and presented based
on facts proven through analysis performed by researchers.
1. Balance
between diversity in employees
Employee
diversity plays a major role in employee engagement. A study on this [article 1]
by Falatah has considered employees
of different diversities in his sample selection. When inviting participants
for the sampling, he has considered employees from different nationalities,
gender, employees who are working on critical areas and non-critical areas, employees
with different qualifications, and employees from different categories (e.g. permanent
and interns). The outcome of the study revealed that the most participants to
the study were females with many of them having a bachelor’s degree, and majority
were engaged in non-critical working areas.
Research [4]
further categorises the diversity in employees into below areas:
-
measurable
aspects of the employee, such as the salary, professional category and
managerial level
-
qualitative
aspects of the employee, such as the perception of the employee on his work experience,
and alignment of the skillset to the job role
2. Employee
working environment
The
journal [2] “Unveiling the Relationship between Flextime and Job Performance” explores
details around employee working environment, considering sample employees who
work online, and on-site, and with and without flexible working hours. Study revealed
that employee perception about work environment has been positive when they are
given the opportunity for flexible working hours.
Two ways
of providing flexibility in working are discussed in this journal, which have reflected
increased performance, based on this analysis [2]
-
Flexplace – where the workplace of the employee
is optional. Employee could work from office, from home or any suitable place enabling
the employee to attend to work
-
Flextime
– where the working time is flexible, based on employee’s preference.
3. Healthy
family environment
Results from
the study [2] has revealed that the reduced conflicts in employee’s family results
in less work stress, and leads to high performance. Since conflicts in family
environment drains the employee’s time and energy, by enabling a healthy family
environment, the energy and time of the employee can be utilized more productively
in the working environment. It is highlighted in this study that it is high
effective to support employees to reduce family conflicts, in work environments
with extended work hours.
4. Leadership
styles within the organization
Leadership
styles used by leaders within organizations affect employee performance. Certain
leadership styles have been discussed in the study “Environmentally Specific
Servant Leadership and Brand Citizenship Behavior”, namely, transformational
leadership, responsible leadership and Environmentally specific servant leadership
(ESSL). The Servant leadership provides direct results in employee performance,
since this leadership approaches to improve the employee while gaining benefits
to the organization.
5. Meaningful
work
Meaningful
work refers to engagements of employees to activities that produce a value. For
the employee to pursue performance, it is essential that he understands the
value of the work he is engaged in. Communicating and establishing the value of
work within an organization is to be formed with the intervene of senior stakeholders
of an organization, and via highlighting the vision and mission of the
organization. For an example, engaging into work relating to a reputed brand
could make an employee perform at his peak, due to the reason that the employee
feels value in what he delivers. As the article “Environmentally Specific
Servant Leadership and Brand Citizenship Behavior” [3] has elaborated, lack of Meaningful
work would lead to boredom, being emotionally tired, and the feel of pressure.
6. Availability
of job resources
Studies by
Ramirez, Guerra and Sanagustin [5] have indicated that the availability of
required resources in the work environment results in high engagement of the
employee to work, which leads to high performance.
Challenges faced in improving employee performance
While enabling
drivers for achieving employee high performance, it is challenging for the
organization to ensure that performance achieved is worth the resources that
are utilized by the company. When considered above factors, challenges can be
explained as below:
1.
Focusing on certain diversity
factors may change organizational perception negatively - Considering diversity factors of
employees, an organization can select and retain employees with proven high
performance and engagement based on factors. For an example, employees of
certain demography, nationality or gender could be hired and encouraged to
retain. However, this may reflect different perceptions about the organization,
by outsiders, which may be negative, resulting in negative word of mouth, or
negative publicity. This may result in employee performance to be reduced over
time.
2.
Unbalanced flexibilities in work
environment may negatively affect employee performance - Studies [2] have already revealed
that though flexibility, though positive perception is established in employee
about the workplace, it has not always resulted in high performance of the
employees. In certain occasions, the flexibility has resulted negatively either
by leading the employee to excessively work, or to spend the working hours
inefficiently, due to poor time management. Further, due to expectations of
family members for the employee’s high availability for the family, certain
conflicts were also been identified to have raised, leading to unpredicted poor
performance of the employee.
3.
Improper availability of job
resources – it is
difficult to determine the limit of making certain job resources available,
since certain resources are not quantifiable. Hence, incidents could occur
where high availability of certain resources could be misused, or used ineffectively
due to easy access to them. It may be challenging to determine a balance
between required availability of resources and not essential resources as well.
Conclusion
Through multiple
journals and analysis performed on factors affecting employee performance,
above mentioned are important, however, it can be noted based on the challenges
mentioned that, the right factor giving the right performance or performance
increment relies on a large number of factors. Hence, implementing the factors should
be decided based on the experience of the human resources entity of the organization,
based on past learnings. Identifying the correct blend is a continuous journey
in the organization’s process of achieving its vision and mission.
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