Professional Behavior in the Workplace

Running head: PROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOR

Professional Behavior in the Workplace

Workplace Behavior

December 3, 2008

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Professional Behavior in the Workplace....................................................................4

Benefits of Professional Behavior in the Workplace 4

References 5

Introduction

The workplace is an environment in which there is generally a high degree of personal interaction. Recent technological advances have made it much easier for people to communicate with one another. The emergence of the Internet in the 1990"s has forever changed the way that people will interact with one another. E-mail has become a way to connect with co-workers anywhere in the world. No longer is one confined to only communicating with people in their department or office. The increasing popularity of cellular phones had also changed human relations. One can now be reached virtually anytime, anywhere.

Just about every business, will occasionally encounter employees who do not know what it is to be professional/behave professionally. When individuals do not perform or behave in a professional manner, those individuals and their organizations do not achieve their potential. The gap between the results that are achieved in an unprofessional environment and the results that could be achieved in a professional environment is huge.

Professional Behavior in the Workplace

Many organizations are experiencing declining levels of employee responsibility and accountability, increasing employee dissatisfaction and disengagement, the disappearance of

company loyalty, deteriorating customer service, and the evaporation of a solid work ethic. In addition, many organizations are seeing an alarming trend towards arrogance, disrespect, and an outright disregard for policies, procedures, rules, and authority. Many of these problems and challenges stem from the absence of professionalism at school, home, and in the workplace. This lack of professionalism challenges business leaders and managers in the form of lying, dishonesty, mediocrity, rudeness, incompetency, indifference and other unprofessional behaviors that cut across all levels of an organization.

Professional Workplace Behavior is supporting the values and mission of the organization that you work for, building positive relationships with others, communicating in a respectful manner, holding oneself accountable and pursuing change within the system.

Employees at every level of any workplace should foster an environment that encourages professionalism and discourages disrespectful behavior. All employees should behave respectfully and professionally and refrain from engaging in inappropriate workplace behavior.

All professional managers will say that professional behavior is a fundamental part of their profession. Professional behavior is a study that gives managers knowledge on how they should act in the most effective ways working in organizations, especially when it comes to large organizations. It is laid out in several major models that differ from each other in some basic features. It was probably easier to know how to behave at work in 1984 than it is today. Standards were set, policies were written, dress codes were uniform and the daily work structure was mostly from 9 to 5. Along with the business world, society also had a stricter code of conduct that made it easier to honor the rules simply because we knew what the rules were. Over the last 20 plus years so many of the standards of behavior have changed and this has created a constant state of confusion over what to do, how to do and the right thing to do with regard to professional behavior. The casual world of today affords you the luxury of working out of your home, you have flextime for greater mobility, dress codes are almost non-existent and there are more options for work/life balance (HRMagazine). However, even with the positive aspects of becoming a more informal society, all of this casual behavior has a price.

A great number of people, particularly those just