As part of our 'How to...' month, Joao Bocas suggests a few ways to get the best out of your working day.

Performance at work is more than ever a subject that interests companies, senior management, executives and employees in general, regardless of their level of responsibility.

I would like you to join me in this thought provoking exercise to identify factors that influence performance at work. I came up with numerous factors at first when I started brainstorming for this article. Although I believe that six factors are extremely important and directly linked to performance at work. These factors are: health, motivation, support, skills, goals and happiness.

The factors are not necessarily in order of importance due to the fact that it can vary what affects your performance the most. For some people it might be health; perhaps the number one threat for others is the lack of support at work or even their personal life contributing to lack of motivation and low energy levels on how to perform.

Let's explore each factor in more detail:

Health

It is a very straightforward link here: if you suffer from poor health, your performance at work will reflect that. One of the current issues at work is presenteeism - both employers and employees pay a high price due to poor health. Look after yourself, think about what’s really important in life and be honest with your employers in asking for help to address the issue, if that is the case.

Motivation

I come from a sporting background. We all know how important motivation is in order to perform at your best. Let’s go back to the Olympics for instance: what was the athletes motivation to train day-in day-out, week-in week-out, month-in month-out? Yes - the Olympic Games. The dream of winning a medal.

In your working life the focus is harder to conceive compared with the Olympics, however motivation is equally important if you want to perform and remain focused. My advice to employers is to find suitable and relevant reward systems for employees. Remember: not everybody is the same, so address your workforce with an individual and human-centred approach for better results.

Support

All companies expect their people to perform at their best. It’s a big thing to ask, as you are dealing with people. You can’t dictate and predict their performance. What I mean by this is you cannot expect constant peak performance from everyone. We have feelings, emotions, moods, thoughts, problems and many other factors which can easily affect your performance.

You can support people by engaging with them on a human level, and by doing that you can expect to help people to perform to their peak performance more often and for longer periods of time.

Skills

Performance is often most affected due to lack of skills, undeveloped skills or even nonexistent skills to perform certain tasks. Therefore, training and developing your people should be at the top of your list if you wish them to perform at work.

Goals

Having ambitious, realistic and sustainable goals will directly impact on your capacity to perform. Whether you are pushing for a promotion, looking to develop skills or finishing a big project, whatever the goal is will keep you focused and motivated. Make sure you have challenging goals behind everything you do.

Happiness

Today positive psychology research is very advanced- there are existing studies that link happiness to productivity and performance. It's a very straightforward conclusion: if you are happy in what you are doing you will give everything and therefore performance will be better.

I hope this article contributes to your overall performance at work. However, there are hundreds of other potential factors that can influence performance, but I narrowed it down to what I believe are most significant in terms of performing better at work. I hope you enjoyed it.

Joao Bocas is CEO of Sports13