Many employees are much busier at work these days yet may be much less productive—in terms of adding real value to company, client, and employee. Obviously it’s a mistake to equate busyness with real productivity. But it’s done all the time. Merely being busy only leads to burn out and frustration. It also results in feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, and low self-esteem. Likewise, a busy, busy professional is often not only a less productive one but a very frustrated one at that.
What’s the difference between real productivity and busyness? Think of a painter’s goal of painting a room the color blue. The actual job’s goal, painting the room blue, is relatively easy to do. But the hard part, the real pain of the job, is the prep and setup work, as well as the take-down and clean-up work, that must be done before and after the room is actually painted. Old rotten wallpaper may have to come down, holes may have to be covered, water damage from old leaks may have to be repaired, and so-on and so-forth. Suddenly merely painting a room blue is not as simple as it sounds.
One should adjust time allotment for a job, by the task(s) required to do the job right, not the other way around. That is, cutting quality in order to get the job done faster and cheaper, usually leads to long-term waste, unnecessary redo’s, unhappy clients and workers, and disastrous bottom lines. Yet this seems to be the prevailing focus these days—cheap fast work, rather than solid, quality work done within a reasonable amount of time. Cutting corners (and therefor value) is always a mistake.
And so (given our example of painting a room blue) because prep work, take-down and setup, etc. is a necessary integral part of the job, it must be included as part of the overall job estimate and analysis. It’s the real dirty work of the job, the unpleasant part. Yet it must not be confused with the actual job’s goal or purpose, which is nothing more than getting the walls painted blue. Nevertheless, it’s in the difficult details of a job where “busyness” can take over. Busyness can often simply be a means of avoiding the real dirty work, that unpleasant side of working toward a job’s real intended outcome.
Avoidance of real work is often a failure to see its value or purpose and one’s personal role in adding value to that purpose. It is a failure to see the good that one can bring to others by doing one’s job well—in a timely fashion and with quality. In that sense it helps for an employee to see that prep work, set-up and take-down etc. is in fact as significant as the job’s goal itself—so long as it is efficiently and effectively done to actually reach the intended goal.
The bottom line is that though people obviously are working for MONEY, money will never fully satisfy as much as knowing that one is adding value and goodness to the world by the work one is doing. A job’s real purpose is to add value to humanity and humanity’s wellbeing. In that sense, no job is too low or demeaning to do if one considers the benefit or value it adds to others. Where would we be, for example, if we didn’t have someone picking up our trash on a weekly basis? Now there is an example of a significant worker that adds value to our way of living to whom little appreciation is given.
Anyway, the point is that we must not lose sight of the end-goal of a job, the final outcome for which we are working: adding value to our lives with intended outcomes that are to benefit all stakeholders.
One last thing, the thing about time is that time is both within and beyond our control. And so, neither take shortcuts to save time or money, nor become so tediously busy that you lose sight of the job’s intended outcome. Rather, respect both time and money by working efficiently and rhythmically, if you will, which is to say consistently, persistently, and purposefully—with a determined focus on the job’s goal, which is a quality product, accomplished in a timely manner, with superb results, benefitting all—clients, company, and employees.
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