Fashion has deviated throughout the last few decades over whether to include one’s hobbies on your CV or not. Critics suggest it’s largely an irrelevance that takes up valuable space that could be better spent explaining your key skills and experience, whereas advocates believe it provides a valuable insight into the kind of skills and values you have as a person.
New research from Curtin University suggests this latter group may have a point. The study found that employees who do sport, learning or volunteering outside of work are not only more likely to be proactive in their work, but are more likely to get proper sleep and various other extra-curricular activities that benefit us at work.
“After work, people often take part in activities to alleviate stress, such as reading books, practicing new hobbies, going to the gym and cooking. These activities have a knock-on effect for the quality of our sleep and how we should feel the next morning when we go to work,” the researchers explain. “How we feel at work impacts our proactivity, which helps create competitive, dynamic and fast-changing work environments, and translates to better work results and career success.”
Boosting productivity
The study found that people who do various activities outside of work, be it sport, education or volunteering received a significant boost to their performance at work. The flip side of this is that people who had too much relaxation after work were lulled into a slumber when they returned to work.
The researchers believe that their findings have significant implications, not only for recruitment, but also for managers when they deal with their team.
“Our research suggests that managers and organisations could run workshops or seminars to help employees better understand the relationship between their personal lives and their daily work,” they explain. “It may also be beneficial for managers to take measures to help employees cope with negative experiences that occur outside of work and accept that employees’ proactive behaviour fluctuates from day to day. If managers have more reasonable expectations of their employee’s proactive behaviour, then they will be better equipped to respond to an employee’s change in proactivity.”
