Table of Contents
Before we explore how you can work in new and different ways, let’s first consider the alternative. How can you boost your performance if you don’t redesign? The obvious alternative is to put in longer hours, working harder in the same way. Chances are you’re already doing that.
In a 2009 survey by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow and research associate Jessica Porter, 94 percent of the 1,000 professionals surveyed reported working 50 hours or more a week, and a staggering 50 percent of them said they worked more than 65 hours a week. The latter figure translates into 13 hours per day, five days a week. Ouch! In a study of high earners, management writers Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce found that a full 35 percent worked more than 60 hours a week, and 10 percent worked more than 80 hours a week. A job with the traditional 40-hour workweek seems like a part-time gig. (Excerpt is from ‘Great at Work’ by Morten T. Hansen)
Does working long hours increase performance? The prevailing “work harder” mindset presumes that it does, but the truth is more complicated. Morten T. Hansen & his team analysed the relationship between weekly hours worked and performance among the 5,000 managers and employees in our study. As the “Squeezing the Orange” chart reveals, working longer hours enhances performance, but only to a point. If you work between 30 and 50 hours per week, adding more hours on the job lifts your performance. But once you’re working between 50 and 65 hours per week, the benefit of adding additional hours drops off. And if you’re working 65 hours or more, overall performance declines as you pile on the hours.
Squeezing the Orange: Performance vs Hours Worked
Note: Based on regression analysis of 4,964 people
Other research has documented the same inverted U. Studying factory workers at a weaponry plant in Britain in 1914, Stanford economist John Pencavel found that performance topped out at 64 to 67 hours per week, beyond which it began to fall. Where the curve starts to flatten and where it plateaus may vary from job to job and industry to industry.
It’s like squeezing juice from an orange. At first, you get a lot of liquid. But as you continue to squeeze and your knuckles turn white, you extract a drop or two. Eventually, you reach the point where you’re squeezing as hard as you can, but producing no juice. You would have done better just to leave the well-squeezed orange alone. It’s the same with hours worked. If you’re already working 50 hours per week, resist the temptation to invest more hours at work. Instead, ask yourself: “Can I work smarter, rather than more?”.
Redesign For Value
The redesign isn’t about working longer hours. It’s about changing how you work. Yet, not all redesigns generate better results. One manager in the study reshuffled the organizational chart every twelve months and diminished his organization’s performance. A pharmaceutical saleswoman kept redesigning her sales pitch, and her revenues remained flat. So what distinguishes a great redesign from a not-so-great one?
Exploring back into our data, we found that fruitful redesigns all shared one thing in common: value. A good redesign delivers more value for the same amount of work done. That begs the question: what is value, exactly?
As the study suggested, we should evaluate the value of our work by measuring how much others benefit from it. That’s an outside-in view because it directs attention to the benefits our work brings to others. The typical inside-out view, by contrast, measures work according to whether we have completed our tasks and goals, regardless of whether they produce any benefits.
Morten T. Hansen shared his finding “Many people never question whether their work produces value. When I conducted research at Hewlett-Packard, I visited an engineer at the company’s Colorado Springs, Colorado, offices. After I introduced myself, he waved me off, claiming he was too busy to meet. And he was busy: he had to complete his goal for the week as specified in his job description, namely, submitting a quarterly project status report to headquarters. He sent off the report in time, as he had every previous quarter. Goal accomplished, right? Yes, except for one issue. What I knew—and he didn’t—was that the corporate research and development division in Palo Alto, California, no longer used those quarterly reports. His dispatches sank to the depths of an email box that no one bothered to check. He had met his goal according to his job description, but he had contributed zero value.”
The advice “start with goals” when planning an effort, is wrong. We need to start with value, and then proceed to goals. Ask yourself: what benefits do your various work activities produce, really?
You might wonder why so many people like our HP engineer focus on activities that yield marginal or no value. One answer: poor metrics. A customer order handler in our study reported that his shipments reached corporate customers 99 percent of the time. That’s pretty impressive—except for one thing. When his boss surveyed the customers, a full 35 percent complained that their shipments were arriving later than required. And why was that? The order handler was measuring whether the shipments left his warehouse according to his schedule (an inside-out view) rather than when the customer needed the equipment (an outside-in view).
Another problem is our awkward tendency to equate volumes of activity with accomplishments. Doctors have traditionally measured their performance according to the number of patient visits they handled rather than how often they arrived at the correct diagnosis. Lawyers bill clients based on how many hours they work, regardless of whether they’re dispensing good counsel. Salespeople fixate on revenues, regardless of whether their products end up benefiting customers. Then we have people who rack up volumes of activities and run around bragging about how busy they are as if busyness equals value. People mistake the number of meetings, task forces, committees, customer calls, customer visits, business trips, and miles flown for accomplishments, even if in reality all these activities may not add value. Being busy is not an accomplishment.
As the study revealed, a number of people do add value by taking an outside-in view and focusing on how they can benefit others. Terry, a production technician working at a New Orleans food packing plant, oversaw a machine that stuck labels on cans and packed cans in boxes. His boss measured him on “throughput”—the number of boxes processed. But Terry didn’t just concern himself with that narrow measure. When boxes streamed out of his machine, they headed to the warehouse, where workers stacked them onto pallets for shipment. “The other day,” Terry told study team, “I went over to the warehouse and asked, ‘Is there something we can do better?’ They said that the boxes weren’t square coming out of my machine—they were closed, they were proper, but they weren’t perfectly squared.” As a result, it took extra time to assemble the pallets, and trucks filled with them were leaving the warehouse late.
Terry redesigned his packaging process so that the boxes emerged perfectly square. This change allowed the warehouse department to improve its throughput and the trucks to depart on time. Terry didn’t have to take that initiative. He could have confined himself to an inside-out view, paying attention only to the number of boxes he processed. Because he focused on adding value and not simply fulfilling his job specification, he scored as one of the best performers in the study (top 15 percent).
New Formula for Value
To gain a more precise understanding of value, it helps to contrast it with how people have traditionally thought about productivity. Here’s a traditional productivity equation:
A person’s work productivity = output of work / hours of input
Charles can transcribe 60 words per minute from an audio file, while John can manage 120 words per minute. He’s twice as productive. Now consider an equation that emphasizes value:
The value of a person’s work = Benefits to others × quality × efficiency
The value equation hinges on three components. The first of these, as we’ve seen, has to do with how much your work benefits other people or your organization. It’s no longer an issue of how many words of text you can transcribe, but rather how beneficial that transcription is to others. Maybe the transcript isn’t necessary in the first place. If the benefit is zero, the value is zero (that’s why there is a multiplication sign in the equation because the total value goes to zero if the benefit equals zero). It doesn’t matter how fast you type out a document if nobody reads it.
The phrase “benefits to others” can mean contributing to your department, your office, a colleague, your company, your customers, your clients, or your suppliers (or even to the community or environment). The benefits themselves can take various forms, including enabling others to do their jobs better, helping create new products, or devising better methods for getting work done. Terry helped his colleagues in the warehouse stack and shipped the boxes more conveniently.
The second component of value is the quality of your work—the degree of accuracy, insight, novelty, and reliability of your work output. We want an error-free transcription, for instance.
The final component of value is how efficiently you work. In the transcription example, productivity was measured through speed—the number of words per minute. Speed matters in the value equation, too. After all, you’re not adding much value if you’re delivering an error-free transcript at ten words per minute.
“DON’T PURSUE GOALS, BUT VALUE”
EXAMPLES OF HOW VALUE CREATION DIFFERS FROM GOALS
#Job Type: Goal-focused (Internal metric) >> Value-focused (Benefits to others)
#1 Human resources professional: Complete annual performance reviews for 70 percent of managers >> Ensure 70 percent of managers receive helpful feedback for how to improve
#2 Business logistics operator: 85 percent of shipments must leave our warehouse according to our schedule >> Deliver 85 percent of shipments to customers when they need them
#3 Salesperson (retail clothing store): “Up-sell” one additional garment to each buyer visiting the store >> Only “up-sell” to buyers wanting an additional garment
#4 Elementary school teacher: Complete three years of teaching math and obtain tenure at school >> Help 90 percent of students become proficient in math
#5 Medical doctor: See 160 patients in the office during January >> Diagnose patients accurately 80 percent of the time and give proper treatment
#6 Lawyer: Achieve 80 percent billable hours in first quarter of year >> Help clients solve legal problem in 80 percent of cases in first quarter
#7 College professor: Get twelve academic papers accepted for publication in prestige journals in five years >> Publish three academic papers that advance the field substantially (and are much cited)
#8 Social services consultant (government): Administer 200 case files (clients) during 2022 >> Ensure 70 percent of clients get positive outcome (job, housing, etc.)
#9 Call center service representative: Process ten customer calls every hour >> Fix customer’s problem in the first call 90 percent of time
Putting it all together, we get a more precise view of value: to produce great value at work is to create output that benefits others tremendously and that is done efficiently and with high quality.
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