10 Characteristics of Great Employees

There are certain characteristics and behaviours that great employees have in common, all of which could be affecting your current employee productivity rate.

How productive are your employees? Or, if you are the employee, how well are you making use of your time? Varying productivity rates result in multiple outcomes for a company.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. A simple sum you can use to work out employee productivity is your revenue divided by the number of staff members, for example:

$5M ARR / 75 staff members = employee productivity of $66K

This shows what type of revenue you can create per employee headcount. As a rule of thumb, top performing SaaS companies should aim for $120–150k. At certain times, however, productivity in companies has to drop.

For example, at ScreenCloud we’ve invested heavily in product development and have almost doubled our headcount over the last year. As a result, our productivity levels are a little low right now, but it’s because we believe that a better product and more experienced people will improve our offering in the long-run.

So what are the other reasons a company may have a low employee productivity rate?

1. There are too many people

This is a management consideration but it is possible to over-staff a company. Tech company Buffer wrote this transparent post about laying off 11% of its staff with one of the factors being that it grew the team too big, too fast.

This is a tricky balance, to find the right balance between nice to have and need to have.

Then there are others where staff members themselves can make changes.

2. The people aren’t experienced enough

Experienced people are more likely to land at the right answer faster, mainly because they’ve done it before or they can make a better judgement call based on previous experience. Generally speaking, they also know how to prioritise for the greatest impact.

When you’re a startup chances are, apart from the founding team, there probably aren’t that many experienced team members.

You can’t inject experience into someone so what can less-experienced employees do to help themselves grow faster?

• Listen to experience and act out what is said — even if it doesn’t make sense right now or comply with your gut instinct. Look and learn, as there’s probably a good reason behind what more experienced team members say.
• Have the self-discipline to ruthlessly prioritise your work. Caveat: do this against the company mission. Often, less experienced people tend to go down rabbit holes rather than stepping back and thinking: is this worth doing right now?
• Educate yourself with the experiences of others — that could be by trying to find a mentor, reading or listening to podcasts. If you haven’t got your own experiences you should be trying to listen to as many others as possible.

Hint: when you’re trying to build knowledge and experience you know you’re getting close when the things you’re reading or listening to start to heavily repeat. Then you’ll know you’re honing in on what the conventional wisdom is for this task or area.

3. The people aren’t good enough

At ScreenCloud we believe that if people are working here we’ve already validated that they are good, but perhaps they haven’t quite reached the possibility of being great yet.

We think that in the year ahead we’ll need to fully realise our potential as a company, but also as individuals. So what does it look like to move from good to great?

The 10 Characteristics of Great Employees

Here are some of the behaviours that repeat in great employees:

1. I identify problems to fix but, rather than just report, I initiate or own the solution

This means that rather than holding a mirror up and saying, here are all the things that are broken or need to be improved, they take initiative to try and move the problems forward or find a solution. This short story illustrates that rather well.

2. When people ask me “Why?” and I don’t know — I reflect on it and investigate

“Why” is an interesting one. A lot of good people do what they’re told and follow the process exactly as it is. But they don’t necessarily know why that thing is done in that certain way. If you take the time to understand the why, then you master it. Only then do you have the option to shift, and improve things.

3. Every time my work is reviewed my goal is to reduce the number of changes over time

Everyone has a level of review. When great people submit the same type of thing for review, they aim to move away from heavy edits and feedback to small changes and tweaks.

Over time, there should be some things the manager doesn’t need to check any more. Then it should reduce further — to advice rather than editing or signing-off.

4. I never miss my own deadlines or have people chase me. If delayed, I communicate ASAP

This is a big one. Great people are honest to their own deadlines and do what they say they’re going to do. If they say they’ll come back to you on Monday, you don’t have to chase them on Tuesday — they anticipate that you’re waiting for them. They also communicate early when they think they might miss a deadline, ensuring they’ve communicated what might have gone wrong and why.

5. I aspire for my work to be adopted and trusted by my co-workers and customers

Imagine if someone in the team asks “Has anyone got a good example of a contract document” and two people reply. Who is that person going to chose? This is a big signal on whether that person is trusted and if their work is adopted by fellow co-workers.

6. People want to delegate to me when it matters

In a similar vein, people want to delegate to great people when it matters. Usually, a person who’s in a position of authority has choices on who they can delegate to. With a crucial task they’re going to delegate to the person they believe they can trust the most — is that going to be you?

7. I’m thorough. When tasked with four things to do, I never just do three

When we ran our old agency we had a high rate of being shortlisted for proposals. One of the main reasons was because we did everything the proposal asked for. By taking out a highlighter we made notes on everything that was requested and cross-referenced that our proposal had provided answers to every single one of them.

This is rare.

If someone emails you four questions, don’t just answer three.

8. If my projects are all 90% done, it bothers me

A lot of people are good at getting 90% of a project done, but bad at getting it over the line and out into the world.

The thing is, the last 10% isn’t really 10%, it’s often the hardest part. That’s when you’re getting ready to push it out into the real world. If you have a lot of projects hanging around the 90% mark, that’s a problem and it should bother you.

9. When I work on cool things I share and educate others

When we’re doing interesting things that other people are benefiting from, we should go the extra mile to share them. This blog post, as an example, started as a presentation I gave to the ScreenCloud team in our monthly All Hands. By repurposing it into content it lives on and can potentially help more people.

10. Senior people rarely have to parachute in to help me

Great people want to avoid other people having to parachute in to rescue something they’re working on. Occasionally this can’t be helped, but it should be an exception rather than a rule.

What makes a hero? (Hint: it isn’t a cape)

Throughout all 10 of those characteristics, there are a few defining traits that great team members share.

Self-discipline and tenacity — Self-discipline is at the heart of everything you do.

Dedication to continuous learning — Being dedicated to always learning more and never thinking that you’ve got far enough.

Never settling, always progressing — You may have achieved a good level, but knowing that there’s always room to progress further.

It burns when they let someone down or screw up — If you know you’ve screwed up, owning up to this and feeling bad without anyone else having to tell you to feel bad. Forgive yourself, but don’t let yourself off.

No fear of flying — Get your work out there — it’ll force you to make it better.

Accountability — We all have managers and reviews but ultimately the only person who should be holding you accountable is you.

I’ll leave you with this:

Go do what you said you were going to do yesterday. Take yourself from good to great. I know that’s what we’ll be striving for at ScreenCloud over the next 12 months.

If you have any thoughts on this post please let me know in the comments below.

Photo Credits: Netflix, New Line Cinema, Justice League / DC Comics, CNN