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.

 

Reference

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3.     Elshaer, I.A.; Azazz, A.M.S.; Kooli, C.; Alshebami, A.S.; Zeina, M.M.A.; Fayyad, S. Environmentally Specific Servant Leadership and Brand Citizenship Behavior: The Role of Green-Crafting Behavior and Employee-Perceived Meaningful Work. Eur. J. Investig. Health Psychol. Educ. 2023, 13, 1097-1116. https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe13060083

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