Who is the most desirable, most valuable employee to employers?
The conscientious employee is the best employee to be. Conscientiousness is a personality trait of the “Big Five personality traits,” a theory that divides personality into five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They represent different facets within us, however conscientiousness relates directly to performance.
If you’re like me and are high on the conscientious scale, you’re highly responsible and you work diligently without supervision. Conscientious employees are reliable and they’ll be at work on time or early, regardless if their boss is around. They are hard-working individuals and motivated internally. They tend to be absent less and be more enthusiastic about performing well at work. To one extreme, they can be perfectionists. As a result, conscientious employees may experience increases in pay and promotion.
Those who have low conscientiousness are generally lazy and laid back, people you’d see as procrastinators or even slackers. When the boss is away or not monitoring them, they have a tendency to do less work and not care if everything isn’t up to standard. Unlike those who score high on conscientiousness, they’re more likely to engage in counterproductive behaviours, such as theft, long breaks, gossiping, and even harassing their colleagues.
It’s important to stay focused at work to ensure that managers aren’t seeing you as someone that isn’t conscious of their actions and isn’t taking the job seriously. The more diligently you perform your duties at work, the more likely your manager is to trust you to do your work on your own and give you the freedom to do it, something every employee wants. Be aware of how often you’re doing tasks that are outside of your specified duties, since your boss will definitely pick up on that kind of thing.
Ideally, every employer wants to hire and retain the conscientious employee. They’re more willing to put in the effort needed and often reap the rewards as a result. Conscientious employees don’t need to be motivated externally to work and they often spend the workday actually working, securing their position in the organization at the same time.