A working pattern comes to life when we start doing something systematically and repeatedly. It could be something very basic, such as always reading your morning e-mails with a cup of coffee in hand or something a bit less innocent, such as never providing positive feedback without saying something critical first. The main point here is that every one of us has his or her own way of doing every specific task and this way may differ from how other people approach the same task. Why am I talking about something as obvious as that?

The reason is very simple: even though we’re living in a culture that stresses the importance of respecting the personal style of other people, as Managers we cannot allow ourselves to remain completely neutral when employees with certain working patterns achieve significantly less than employees with different patterns!

There is a very basic truth to be acknowledged here: the amount of optimal ways to do the job is usually limited. Straying too far from these ways practically means diminishing the results of your work. But how do we know which working patterns are optimal? How do we know to recognize the ones which are less optimal or even harmful when employed?

These questions are not easy to answer, because there are so many different tasks to be managed and dealt with in our workplaces. Many employers try to do their best to cover those tasks during the orientation for new employees, however experience consistently shows that this not always enough. Most likely, it’s due to the fact that people who already have some experience in a certain field already have established working patterns. Teaching them from scratch may well mean disregarding all the experience they were actually hired for and this may not be the best way to manage your resources.

So what can you do?

In my next series of posts, I’ll try to discuss some issues regarding our working patterns that are much more universal than “what is the best way to do a certain task”. Dealing with those issues first will allow you to manage the working patterns in your workplace in a much better way.

Stay tuned 🙂

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