What are your best work hacks/systems to becoming an all star employee?

August 6, 2020 3:29 PM

Example of a system would to write what you accomplished daily and at the end of the week gather the weeks worth of accomplishments and send it to your manager. Anything like this, where it's an ongoing and easy effective system?
posted by schleppy123 to Work & Money (15 answers total)

I think it'd be helpful to get some clarification as to what you mean by "all star employee". Your description makes it sound like you're just looking for a way to improve status reporting? Or are you looking for all sorts of tips on how to work more efficiently/better?

Be as vague or specific as you want, but here's a couple questions that might help guide some answers:

- What do you do (or, if you don't want to be specific, what industry are you in)? Office work, production work, something else?
- Do you work remotely or on-site?
posted by pdb at 3:50 PM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Another thing that might be helpful for us to provide advisement is whether this is something that has been requested by your manager, or if this is something you are taking on by your own initiative.
posted by queensissy at 3:51 PM on August 6, 2020

Have you read Ask A Manager website? She's got great info on how to be a stellar employee that applies to most settings.
posted by tipsyBumblebee at 3:52 PM on August 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

Taking really good notes and managing them effectively.
posted by synecdoche at 3:54 PM on August 6, 2020

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but RescueTime Premium has a daily highlights feature where you can be prompted to write short sentences about what you accomplished each day, or in each given set of hours. It's pretty flexible. I have it trigger to open the highlights page to prompt me for entries when I've been in Microsoft Word for a certain amount of time and at the end of each work day.

RescueTime is a really powerful productivity tool. I've used it for 10 years and continue to find it to be integral to my workflow and to making sure that I make progress on all of the various projects that I'm involved in. I would never let my employer have access to these records, but it would be possible to set something up where RescueTime gathers data (including highlights) for you and then summarizes it in a daily email, for example.
posted by k8lin at 3:55 PM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

If you can organize your work using kanban boards, that will give you an easy way of tracking what you worked on each day and what you accomplished.
posted by Candleman at 4:39 PM on August 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Honestly, the best people I managed could be obnoxious goofballs, but if they successfully and competently completed everything I threw at them (and I am very good at assessing how much to throw at people), then I'm good. I know how they're doing and don't need anything else.
posted by history is a weapon at 4:53 PM on August 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

A lot of this varies by industry, role, and experience - could you provide a little more context for your question?
posted by punchtothehead at 5:08 PM on August 6, 2020

I think your question is less about becoming an all-star employee and more about being perceived as one. Is that your intent? My advice would be different knowing that, in addition to a few things others have mentioned.

For example, I think that tooting your own horn during your review process feels like an awkward thing to do, but it can be really valuable in helping your manager assess your growth and contributions in a way that can pay off in a multitude of ways. But to get to a point where you can toot your own horn, you'd need to be doing something that has a measurable output, and not all work lends itself as easily to that kind of analysis.
posted by sm1tten at 6:16 PM on August 6, 2020

I literally did what you suggest, and I do think it made me an all-star employee. Each Monday, I would open a new email and jot down highlights throughout the day as projects got completed or ideas got generated or whatever I did that moved my boss's priorities forward. I spent an hour so on Fridays formatting it and cleaning it up, and sent it to my boss and my grand-boss. It helped set my agenda for the next Monday, kept my accomplishments in front of them on a regular basis, kept them up to date on where their priorities were, gave me something to review before my annual reviews so I could toot my own horn, and eventually helped me flesh out my resume when I left that job.

In addition to the ways it helped for those couple of years, it gave me skills and habits that I still use now, more than a decade later. I no longer send that email to anyone else, but I now have an ongoing habit of documenting where I am with projects, giving myself time at the end of the week to review what is still outstanding and setting myself an agenda for the following week, working my boss's priorities into my own daily tasks and letting them know about it, and finding ways to toot my own horn (and now that I manage others, the horns of others). I wouldn't call it a hack necessarily, and it doesn't need to be overbuilt as a system. Work hard on the right things and tell your boss about it. Store it in an email draft that gets backed up automatically until you're ready to send it. The end.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 8:40 PM on August 6, 2020 [7 favorites]

At a previous job we had to do weekly IOIs - Items of Interest. I always assumed it was a common thing so didn't document exactly what was involved, but I think it was:

1) Numbers on your performance, if that's a thing that your job involves.
2) Things you learned and successes/wins.
3) Items to carry over for next week that still need work or you need help with.
posted by MonsieurBon at 10:32 PM on August 6, 2020

Here are unorganized, hodgepodge suggestions of things that have worked very well for me. They may not work for everyone, but I've used these in lots of different roles and organizations; on site and remote. I would dare say that I am often considered a great employee and teammate.

• A work journal to refer back to when you need to know what you've accomplished. It is surprisingly hard to remember all the great things you've done.
• I do not trust my brain to remember things even though I have a better than average memory. Everything I say I will do or items of note go into my calendar, notes (centralized in two main places), and action reminders via slackbot or tool of your choice. A nuance here is that if I take notes on something, I try to immediately translate it into the necessary action or next step. Even if that next step is to think of what to do next. It gets scheduled. Automated reminders are awesome. This allows you to better follow through on everything; and if you can't, proactively let people know and propose alternative solutions. My automated reminders and calendar notes go a long way in helping me keep on top of things, and also help me anticipate when tasks and outcomes will go off track.
• Clear, detailed documentation on what I'm working on so that if someone else needs to step in for me, they can. This especially goes for when I am going on vacation or am out. I usually come up with a detailed OOO (out of office) plan that shares exactly where things are, what the next steps and necessary deliverables are by when, and who is responsible in my stead. It is shared widely with those who I'm working directly with and my manager (and maybe manager's manager if it is relevant). This inspires an immense amount of confidence in your work and helps others be better teammates too. I believe strongly in ensuring there is not a single point of failure in my work.
• peanut_mcgillicuty's (and other's) suggestions around having dedicated time to organize and plan for your week/workflow matters. I am not disciplined enough to do it at a regularly scheduled time (even though I schedule it, ha), but I do it naturally at least once a week (just for myself). Would highly recommend creating space to do this as well.
• This is my personal opinion (and something I believe has set me apart in my workplaces), but using these systems and tools to also recognize, care, and cheer for my teammates and make them better at their jobs has led to incredibly strong teams, awesome output, and in combination of lots of other things helped turned the tide of some toxic environments. Having a wonderful team of colleagues I enjoy working with makes or breaks my professional life.

Happy to further clarify if needed! Good luck!!!
posted by sums at 1:27 AM on August 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I use emacs .org mode for this sort of note taking. Here is someone's blog post on org mode

I have this setup with a hot key so that at any time I can bring up an editor to capture a new note under it's own heading. If I'm in emacs saving the note closes it and takes me back to where I was before I was writing the note. For me this is a key feature as makes note taking a task pushed on to my attention "stack" then automatically popped back off.

With emacs .org these notes can be output as HTML or PDF so when I send these out they look good. The can come out as a PDF with a TOC of time stamped journal entries and hierarchical structure.

I agree with all of what sums said too. Also when others are out of the office I can send them a note of what has been going on.

Regarding toxic environments, a journal of observations is great for keeping grounded.
posted by bdc34 at 7:27 AM on August 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

In addition to a "to do" list, I keep a "did do" one, to document all those interruptions and last-minute requests that can fill up a day quickly. That can be useful if your boss is the kind that only wants to know about your progress towards pre-defined goals but ignores the unexpected or routine.
posted by rpfields at 9:18 AM on August 7, 2020

Two step process: transforming into an all-star and being recognized as one.

Step 1: Transformation

You need three things: time to grow skills, connections, and time to execute. Time to grow means setting aside time in your life for learning, skill building and professional development. Spending an hour every day focused on learning is the target I have set (not that I am nessecarily an allstar). I have a Trello board for personal todos, which also tracks articles and books to read, and an Anki deck to help memorize useful facts and formulas I might not immediately have use for to help retain lessons from reading. Depending on your profession, there are also online courses, and personal projects you can try for the sake of learning something new.

Connections are gonna help you in step 2, but also in terms of discovering what's important for growing skills. You want a healthy network inside your organization, but also outside it. Random example: I was able to unblock a useful feature, for a software product I use, by contacting some loose connections I had to vendor and to the developer relations team that needed to approve their API access. I am part of a variety of internal and externals slacks and communities of interest; from these I learn a lot about other people's challenges as well as meet people. It doesn't have to be specific to work; hobbies of common interest can also pay dividends if you end up wanting to switch industry sectors or job roles.

Finally, as you level up, you need time to execute with those new skills. Most people treat their calendar as a way to remember when to stop working and attend meetings; I recommend the opposite: use your calendar as a way to remember to stop attending meetings and start working. You do that by putting time on your calendar to complete tasks and declining meetings that interfere with it. At the start of the work week you should be scheduling which day you will work on, and you already have standing 'project work' time on your calendar.

Step 2: Recognition

If you want to be recognized by others as an "all-star" they need to know who you are, and what you have achieved. This means: speaking up in meetings, completing work on to the agreed upon standard, on the agreed upon date, and accepting or even volunteering for the hard work.

Speaking up in meetings means making sure you are contributing towards the decision and building relationships. Sometimes it can be as simple as 'I agree with Jane's approach,' other times you will have to respectfully disagree. When you are confused or uncertain, ask questions you don't know the answer to. In project status meetings it means, reporting green when you're green, and yellow before you report red; trying to save face can backfire catastrophically. Finally, and this is a part I struggle to remember in situ, it can mean inviting other people to offer an opinion.

Next, how do you meet deadlines, so you can report green in those project status meetings? In my field (software engineering / site reliability) we have strong project management tracking tools, and I recommend learning as much as you can about the tools your org uses if you are in that field. Other places are less organized, and Kanban (described by others in this thread) is a good way of organizing todos. At a bare minimum, you should have a todo list with the day on which items are due, and you work first on those tasks whose due date is closest. (Advanced tip: if you also know the effort required, work on tasks with least slack time first).

Depending on your workplace culture, working on hard tasks may be easy (everyone avoids them when possible) or hard (everyone wants to work them to get promoted). In places where the hard work is handled by "all stars", your best bet is to ace your easy tasks reliably, and offer to pitch in on the hard tasks if you're meeting your other goals. If nobody is working on the hard tasks, you should probably just be careful of overvolunteering on them.
posted by pwnguin at 12:14 PM on August 7, 2020 [1 favorite]