A positive attitude in the workplace simply refers to the fact that people you come into contact with clearly see that you are someone who cares about work and are someone who they can rely on.

Therefore, you are someone they want to be around.

Working as a recruiter has allowed me to meet many different people each with their own personality, skills, goals and experience. The one thing that I tend to remember most about a job searcher is whether or not they have a positive attitude in the workplace and there are a number of ways I can measure this.

Do they speak positively about their current or former employer?

How positively do they speak of their accomplishments?

Do they seem like a happy person who is proud of their work or are they desperate to escape their current employer?

Basically, are they someone who I want to help with their job search or do I never want to see this person again? Nobody wants to hang around people who drag you down, right?

When I say “positive attitude in the workplace” I am referring to having a positive attitude in each and every aspect of their career.

My Personal Experience:

Before I became a recruiter I worked for a telecommunications company that regularly restructured.

This is a nice way of saying that they regularly laid people off.

I survived 4 major restructuring and in the last one, I was the only member of my group of 8 people who didn’t lose their job. The job losses at this company were so frequent and big (70+ people were usually let go every time a restructuring occurred) that it wasn’t a matter of if it would happen again but when.

How did I manage to remain employed while other people - who were usually more experienced and had been with the company longer than I had - were let go?

My attitude:

I had built up a good name in the company and my manager (and their manager) basically told me to my face that the people who were being let go were not people that they really saw as being long-term employees. The staff who were being let go were considered to have poor attitudes and were not considered to be worth keeping on board.

Do you ever wonder why a company promotes some people and leaves other staff behind?

The staff who don’t get promoted and who tend to get laid off first often exhibit the same characteristics that many of my colleagues who got laid off exhibited. They are not exceptional in any way and don’t justify remaining employed.

If a company has to get rid of 100 staff, who do you think they will get rid of first? The exceptional people, or the ones who “no one really knows what they do?”

Traits of People Who Have A Positive Attitude in the Workplace

In my experience, people who have a positive attitude in the workplace make it really obvious to those around them because of several traits that they share. They:

are considered to be stars in the company.

offer outstanding work and can be counted on to hold up their end of the bargain.

appear to work hard and it is apparent that they actually care about what they do.

are reliable. They know that talk is cheap. When these people say it, they do it.

may not always agree with you, but they aren’t disagreeable. They don’t disagree just for the sake of starting an argument.

aren’t whiners. They don’t complain a lot.

are more than just a dent in a seat cushion. In other words they don’t just show up to work, sit down in their chair and start making personal calls and reading the newspaper.

Put all of these together and you’re talking about someone who clearly has a positive attitude in the workplace and are probably very well-regarded in their company.

The funniest part about having a positive attitude in the workplace that I noticed was that work that I did that I felt was simple, was often seen by others as being outstanding!

Work I did that seemed really trivial to me was received by my colleagues and managers as being a great achievement and helped them to see me as someone who had a very positive attitude.

It seems to me that my peers gave me the benefit of the doubt based on what they’d come to expect from me in the past.