5 Steps to Help Employees Overcome Perfectionism and Improve Work Productivity

Anxious, burned-out perfectionists may not recognize their perfectionism as a problem. However, demanding excessively high standards, cultivating self-esteem based on meeting those standards, and constantly criticizing yourself will all eventually lead to greater burnout, stress, and frustration.

Is it possible for managers to help the team distinguish between “helpful” and “harmful” perfectionism? How to encourage employees to strive for achievement, not perfection?

Living with perfectionism does not lead to increased productivity or efficiency. Instead, it increases:

• avoidance by employees of what is really important and necessary;
• burnout and procrastination;
• imposed excessive self-management.

Working on perfectionism does not mean limiting yourself to excellent work. People who suffer from perfectionism have no problem with wanting to do an excellent job. The problem is that they are extremely inflexible about what good work looks like and how it should be done. The problem is rigidity, not the desire to do great work.

How to perform quality work without perfectionism?

A worker with a desire for an ideal places extremely high expectations on himself and others and is extremely critical of himself, his behavior and success at work.

In other words, we can talk about perfectionism as a set of rules that are formed in a person’s head. Constantly following these rules can be motivating and rewarding, but they can eventually distract from your main goals and achieve the desired results.

The key to breaking free from perfectionism isn’t to get rid of your rules, but to recognize what they’re meant for, identify when they’re useful and when they’re not, and be adaptable enough to apply them in those cases.

How to implement the theory in practice?

What thoughts usually arise among employees who strive to achieve the ideal in everything? Here is one of the options: “If I don’t fully invest in my work, I won’t achieve anything.” Here are a few others: “If you neglect the smallest details, everything will be ruined.” Or, “No one cares about work as much as I do, so I have to work twice as hard to make sure everything goes well.” To get good work results, you should act step by step, and not try to do everything perfectly.

Employees’ rules indicate their values

If you have the perfectionists on your team, take a piece of paper and write down some of their values. It is important to make sure that each employee has a good enough understanding of their values.

Once the team has done this, it’s time to answer the important question: How well do the actions of each perfectionist on your team align with those values? This is especially true for work. Do employees live up to their values? Are they in a mess of worrying, procrastination, doubt and burnout?

5 steps to help your employees go from perfectionism to productivity

Step 1:

Work with perfectionism. Avoiding this can cause your team to procrastinate or burn out. Or you can take on the challenge and risk exhausting yourself and annoying your team members.

Step 2:

Awareness of perfectionism is difficult for a person. But it is important, as is the recognition of hunger or thirst.

Step 3:

It is important for your team to learn to see an opinion as an opinion. The bottom line is that the team member does not have to agree with the content of the opinion, and even more so, allow to automatically change the behavior of the person himself. This will help to do the job just well, instead of striving for the ideal and eventually procrastinating from fatigue.

There are several approaches to solving this problem: journaling, mindfulness, or creating a journal of thoughts within the framework of cognitive-behavioral therapy. The idea is not to convince yourself of a job well done. But you should not underestimate the concern about the quality and speed of work. Rather, creating some distance between a person and their thoughts will allow for deliberate action, rather than blindly following one’s own convictions.

Step 4:

When perfectionists are sufficiently detached from their thoughts and feelings, it can seem a little scary. They don’t work by default, so the question now is: how should I behave? Values can help you make choices and act on them. At the same time, be guided by rules different from the rules of perfectionists. Such people will be open to finding out what works and what doesn’t.

Step 5:

Employees should consider what they can do to more closely follow their values and fuel their perfectionism less. This can be about proofreading emails as well as delegating tasks. Better to start with something simple.

Conclusions

Take a break after making changes and see how things turned out. People usually benefit from learning to make values-based decisions and listen to their perfectionist tendencies. However, you should not judge it solely by feelings. It makes sense to evaluate how well it works in your case and for your company.

Give yourself and your team time to see the results you’ve been striving for.

If you see positive dynamics, and want to see the results of more productive work in reports and graphs, you can do it with the help of automated solutions such as Yaware TimeTracker. Read more information here.