Be The Best Employee (Without Working Harder Than You Are Now)
Have you ever wondered why some employees produce better work in less time? Many of us can think of a time when another person outperformed them but the reason for why may not have been clear. Given that you are working hard, spending enough time on tasks, and are skilled at what you do, there are individuals who deliver more than you with what appears to be less effort. Hard work is only one component to the equation. You may have heard that working smart is more important than working hard but we all hear this all the time. This is easy to say because of course we don’t want to be working stupid, right? You can also say that talent and luck are big contributing factors, but still, there are other facets to explaining this phenomenon. So what are they?
Working hard is a great way to improve your performance but those who work harder and harder have a reduced quality of life and end up experiencing burnout much sooner. Research shows that, aside from demographics and hours worked per week, the biggest explanation for why top performers perform so well is because of 4 main practices to working smart. The key to working smarter is to achieve a better work-life balance, improve job satisfaction and create less burnout for yourself. You can do all of this while becoming better at your job.
Do Less, Then Obsess
The first practice of working smart is to take on less tasks. Now, this may seem lazy in regard to your work ethic and contributions to your team but let’s dive into this further. Taking on less tasks is only part of the equation and doing this alone will not help you become a better employee. The other key components to taking on less tasks is to focus exceptionally hard on the tasks that you do have. Rather than spreading your attention and effort over an endless list of items that need to be taken care of, instead channel that drive into a few key objectives while at work.
“Doing more” opens you up to two scenarios that make it hard to excel at your work. The first scenario is that you bite off more than you can chew. You take on too many tasks and can’t give enough attention to each to do a great job. The second scenario is that you create too much complexity. The energy needed to deal with the interrelationship of all the tasks is a recipe for wasting time and sub par execution.
It is much easier to focus on a predetermined small set of tasks but how can you increase your focus to get these priorities off your list? Here are a few key culprits that contribute to an inability to focus:
Temptations are the first offender to maintaining focus. Coworkers who walk in and start talking about nonsense, checking email, picking up your phone and scrolling social media, turning to the TV for a breaking news headline are all distractions that make it tempting to abandon the task at hand.
The next inhibitor of focus is too broad of work scope. If there is an endless list of tasks and any that, if not completed, don’t impact your stakeholders much to the point where they are outright unnecessary or of little importance, it makes it easy to give minimal effort or not put your best work into each one.
A third hindrance to focus is the “do-more” type manager. These managers want to make themselves and their boss feel better by making sure all of their employees are loaded up on plenty of work. They think that this is a better way to run the business so that no time is wasted and employees stay productive at all hours of the work day. If it can be done, add it to the pile of tasks of more things to get done that day. The resulting deliverables will be there in quantity but at what cost to the quality?
For these reasons, a valuable tactic is to learn to say no to your boss. You can explain that if your list of tasks is too large, your performance will suffer. Your role in your job is to deliver the best work possible and not spend all of your time pleasing your boss. Use intense effort on the items you outlined for yourself and say no to the ones that overflow your plate.
The last factor in determining how people are able to focus is somewhat unknown. Everyone has different behaviors and personalities so being able to focus can be affected by different outside forces for different people. Physical factors such as caffeine intake, hours of sleep, measures of nourishment and hydration, and stress in other areas of life could also have an effect but the key takeaway is that the three factors listed above make up for most of the reduction in focus.
Remodeling Your Work
The second practice of working smart is to remodel your work. The working hard concept states that the harder someone works, the better they perform. If you already work 50-60 hours per week, adding hours to that weekly quota will have a limited impact on your total output. If you find yourself in this predicament, you need to create new tasks, goals, and performance metrics to produce better and higher volume results.
Many people view productivity in a way that aligns with this equation: Productivity = work output / hours put in.
To be better workers, we want to use this equation instead: Value of work = Benefits x quality x efficiency.
Benefits can mean many different things including enabling colleagues to do their work better, assisting with product creation, and coming up with better methods to get work done. Quality refers to a high level of accuracy, precision, reliability, and thoroughness. Efficiency is being able to be productive in a set amount of time. Work needs to be efficient otherwise it is a waste of time, resources, and money.
Here are 5 ways to remodel work to increase its value:
- Reduce filler activities: Get rid of little value add activities
- More of the good: Increase the amount of high value activities
- More out of the box: Come up with new tasks that are high value
- Top rated: Improve the quality of existing tasks
- Savings: Do activities faster for less money.
The Learning Feedback Loop
When we are growing up, what are we told to do regularly if we want to get good at something? It is to practice. “Practice makes perfect” we hear all the time but going about any subject matter, including your job, with this mentality will lead you to a place of discouragement. Why is it that practicing alone doesn’t make some people succeed in whatever they are doing? This relates back to the prior fundamental that hours put in does not necessarily mean great work.
Let’s put this idea into perspective. We will say that you never golfed before but now want to learn to be the best golfer in the state. If I gave you a bag of golf clubs, unlimited balls, and years of time on a golf course by yourself or even playing with a bunch of other golfers, how long would it take you to par the course? You may never get there. You will probably improve somewhat but eventually you will hit a wall because you can only get so good with what you know about the sport.
Now, instead of just going out there and playing golf constantly hoping to get better at it, what if we approached this task differently. You work with a nutritionist to get your diet and strength improved. A chiropractor and trainer help to increase flexibility and bodily motions. Golf professionals help to address issues with swing fundamentals and strategy for each type of hole. A golf club builder provides proper sized clubs and grips that match your body type. You have the proper glove, cleats, hat, and rangefinder to know the distance to the hole. And lastly, rather than spending all of your time on the actual golf course, you spend some time at the driving range.
Which of these two situations will get you better at golf faster? Most likely it will be the second method. The former is sheer practice but the latter is learning as you go. This makes a lot of sense in regard to sports, musical instruments, and other physical activities but why don’t we look at other areas of our lives in this way? We must realize that in regard to work, most people operate in their jobs day to day similarly to the first scenario and not the second one. This is why we must work smarter and not work harder to achieve more.
In order to learn more at a job in a way that makes you a better worker, it is essential to implement the learning feedback loop. Rather than going about each day following the same methods to approaching problems, minor changes are introduced, measured, subjected to feedback, and adjusted based on the feedback. The minor changes can be changing an approach in a small way. Some examples to this are changing how you ask a question to a colleague, adjusting your hours to start earlier or later to deal with an overseas team, changing how you take notes on a call, or selecting which individuals you bring into certain customer calls.
You want to take small risks first to see how people respond and then analyze the feedback you get. You can continue to scale up or back off from the idea depending on whether it works or not. Individuals that are good at this denote very small chunks of time to improve a specific skill each day. It can be as little as 15 minutes to test out a new idea where you could improve that skill. Within 15 minutes, you can get a strong inclination if this would improve your work or make matters worse. Implementing this daily will have compounding returns over time.
For those who are not constantly pushing the limits to test small changes to learn, there is a tendency to plateau. Once employees can complete a task to a “good enough” level, they no longer need to think about it and it will automate the method in their brain. Once it is automated, it no longer improves and remains at that level of performance indefinitely. The highest performers in any organization are always pushing themselves to explore micro-changes on a daily basis to improve work flows.
Those who fail to learn in a world that is technologically advancing with automation and robots replacing employees will find themselves in a tough situation if they are not able to learn and reframe their work.
Do We Follow Passion or Purpose?
Those who work extremely hard at their jobs are said to have a lot of passion for what they do. If you are passionate about it, you will keep the momentum up even when encountering challenges and bad times. Doing what you love is the best way to be successful. We also hear that if you ignore passion, you are setting yourself for failure up against those who are more passionate than you.
These statements can be true however, passion isn’t the only ingredient to success. If you go through each day doing only what you love, there is still significant risk or failure and disastrous results. For example, you may be passionate about hot dogs and have the best hot dog stand in town. If people do not show up regularly to purchase hot dogs, you may end up in financial trouble.
Those who follow their passion blindly may be led down an unfulfilling path. Rather than “follow”, a more appropriate term would be to “match” their passion. But match it to what? Passion matched with purpose is the most powerful combination. People who feel like they have a purpose, or significant meaning to their role in which they contribute to society greatly increases performance.
As an employee, you want to be in a role that you are both passionate about that also gives you purpose. It is possible to find that new role with better purpose that taps your passion without even changing careers or employers.
Let’s say you work at a restaurant and expedite food as it comes off the grill. You are in the kitchen window performing final preparation of dishes before getting them to the servers. This is a back end job that is fairly mundane. Instead of being an expeditor, what if you became a host instead? If you are passionate about seeing people excited, taking action to make people satisfied, and expressing joy to cheer someone up, working directly with the customers could be a better fit. Your purpose is to make the dining experience as friendly and fun as possible. Organizational skills and listening to customer requests will improve their experience at the restaurant. When the customer feels special, the restaurant will get a better review and attract more customers. Your purpose is defined as helping the restaurant be successful and exceed the quality of its competition which betters the lives of all those involved in the community.
