IIM ROHTAK HUMANE-R PRESENTS IMPRESSIONS June 2021 HUMANE.R@IIMROHTAK.AC.IN
21st century is in the hands of Hard workers or Smart workers. Discuss
21st century is in the hands of Hard workers or Smart workers. Discuss
Work smarter and not harder – an awful Advice! A mere google search will show you about 19,70,00,000 results in 0.36 seconds on how a Smart worker is different from Hard worker, but is it the reality or a just a mere illusion to strive our dead-end desire? Well to understand this with the precision lets first understand the changes and adaptability of the world around the several factors. Education being one of the critical aspects plays an important role in coining the terms like hard work and smart work. The archaic educational system and stereotypical purview by people around the globe lead to anarchial imposition of the technical skills focused approach to the whole system. While educational structure was created to give experience, to give opportunities, to learn adaptability, to learn critical-thinking, to develop emotional thinking and plethora of skills; but sadly, it was all consumed in the fast pacing world and the system walls were left painted with only competition. Competition to learn technical skills and to learn fast became the whole picture, but then again was this enough? No, the system was back to same square where the pillars left behind came across as the futuristic skills of 21st century. Critical thinking, Creative and innovative mindset is the skills in demand for 21st century; leading people not to confide their learning only to technical perspective but also to be future ready. To learn, to adapt, to implement and to grow. Now this focus changed the situation in current the century in regards to the demand and understandability of the market pool availability.
With the spike in demands of the skills like critical thinking, creative edge along with technical skills has been an important aspect in coining the usage of the terms like smart work. Distinctive working perspective to cater to the demand of the business and desire to add more and more constructive criticism leads us to the question, “Is 21st century in the hands of Hard workers or Smart workers?” But is smart work any different from the hard work, or the term is just the fabrication of dire need of the adept juggler on the field. Perceivable and adaptation of the swotting during the building years and then implementation of learning to reach an optimum solution defines the metric of working efficiency of an individual.
KPIs don’t work in isolations but in the system of accessibility, resources and opportunity. An organization with the transformation approach will exhibit different overview for an individual than the organization with limited scope of leveraging. So, another factor affecting the storyline of Smart work and Hard work is how much of the orbit an organization giving the employees to revolve. This being the keen player in the whole game, impacts on different levels: First level being the opportunity to grasp and exhibit the skills that smart work entails to reach superlative execution of the task. No grooming session from education part and then no opportunities on the field may lead to insistent acceptance of roles. Smart work is executing job with less time, less FTE usage, minimal cost and giving the optimal solution wherein Hard work involves the picture of working for excessively long hours, huge amount of work to give out the best possible result. So, if the demand at the end is best outcome by utter dedication towards the task and no limit to the methodology then where is the difference?
The difference if there is any is in the approach and liberty from the systematic tribunals that one faces during the course of the journey of the task assigned. But what if we were never taught the skills to develop the approach, what if we were never given opportunities to grasp the critical thinking for the same and was put on the battlefield to learn, to grasp and to survive. Then survivor becomes the smart worker, who has learned the skill of distinctive approaches. Now the question is where is this hard worker coming from? Hard worker is no one but the same person who learned to execute the task whilst the stringent working requirements with no liberty of choosing the methodology. The person who was expected same optimum outcome but with the lack of picture of creative thinking. Being a part of the already existing rules and regulations of game and no scope of experimenting in the activity leads a person to the stop of being of Hard worker, provided the results are in desired state. So how much scope a person is left with to choose the destiny of Hard worker and Smart worker; with this introduction of the terms also play a vital role and becomes the second level of impact. The etymology of hard work in the industry came with different connotation from the political stance. There goes a saying “Personal is Political” and hence affects the choices we make in personal space. The delirious state of people to achieve the illusionary utmost state was incorporated in everyone from the start. To achieve the state, the space of negotiation was reduced to unicells and all was left to be in the service in all possible state. This created a vicious of circle competition and power, where power controls the pace of competition and vice versa; subtly imposing the concept of how hard work is quotidian reality. Services with no experimental creativity’s scope under the shades of hard work impacted the circle and leading to addition of the term of Smart work.
The human’s desires focused on unrealistic expectations to be the best made a vulnerable spot to be in; using the similar psychology the Hard work was then transformed into the smart work. Be a smart worker, focus on creating, delivering and capturing value was introduced, leading people into the feedback loop from hell wherein an insidious quirk in brain; if let it, can drive one absolutely batty. Exactly that’s what we see today, a hyperbole where two terms being the same but was introduced due to need of the hour. The need that was not of the people but of the system; which was obtruded on the proletariat as a chimeric dream. The faux pas of Smart work and hard work is a trifling idea to digress the way to question the system. Smart work and hard work are nothing more but just the situational execution of the job by an employee under several impacting factors. Factors created by the anachronistic educational industry, manoeuvre of the industries. Building dreams, working hard, learning skills the argument is sound (reasonable), nothing but sound(empty). Instead the 21st century is the era of skills, skills that serve the best solutions along with satisfying the technical requirement. So, managing the choices of the skills acquired, as per the demand, focused based approach to build the strength in the field is the current pilot to the road to success. Conclusively, having the clear expectations of what one want, and what one has and what is one’s worth is the current race; futuristic wardrobe to success is and has always been based on three things, knowledge, skills and adaptation not on the word play of the industry.
Sakshi Bhati, XLRI - HRM
21st century is in the hands of Hard workers or Smart workers? Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Hard Work or Smart Work? The simple answer is to work smart but, as hard as you can. Lots of people work hard, but only a few become truly successful. And this is where smart work comes in. And to start working smarter, there’s an essential rule that you need to keep in mind. The value of what you produce isn’t about how much work went into it – it’s measured by how useful it is to people. So if you can get the same end result, and create something of value by putting in less effort and time, then that’s the route you should be taking. And you shouldn’t feel ashamed that you’ve done less work to get there. It will mean that the time, effort and other resources you’ve saved can all be put to far better use. On the face of it, it seems obvious, but it’s something a lot of people could be doing better. So let’s dive in, and look at a few tips on how to work smarter. Before you start any task, it’s important to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve. You'll need to know what steps are essential to get there; and which ones aren’t necessary, and can be cut out if time doesn’t allow. Too many people end up spending way too long on minor details that nobody’s going to notice or care about. This is because they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture, and in some cases, because they’re too much of a perfectionist. Now the key isn’t necessarily to stop being a perfectionist – this depends on the task you’re given. Imagine you’re an aircraft engineer, and you’re working on a safety feature of an airplane. This is a situation in which you do want to be a perfectionist because the bigger picture tells you that if it’s not perfect, the cost is going to be huge. And the extra time you’ll spend working on getting it just right is worth it. But, now let's compare that with another scenario. Let’s say you’re preparing a PowerPoint for a work presentation.
You know what you’re going to say, but you end up spending hours looking for the right graphics for your slides, even though they aren’t central to what you want to deliver. In this case, you should probably settle for the graphics you’ve got, and moving onto something more productive.
Next, you’ll need to manage your time well. Every smart worker knows that time is the most precious resource they have. If you’re going to create things of value, you only have a certain amount of time to do this, so you need to use it wisely. One thing that a lot of successful people do at the start of the day is to set themselves a list of goals. They make realistic estimates of how much time they need to spend on each task; effectively, a schedule for the day. We’re not saying you need to stick to this schedule 100%; you can always modify it here and there. But if you constantly find yourself spending more time than what you’ve given yourself for tasks, there’s something wrong. In this case, you need to rethink a few aspects.
The key is to make realistic estimates of how long each task will take, and respect those time limits. Also, don’t try to multi-task too much. Most people can only handle so many things at the same time. So if you’re trying to solve five problems at once, your brain will probably be so overcrowded with random ideas for each problem, you won’t be able to focus fully on any one of them. Concentrate on one thing at a time, and try to organize your life so that you don’t have too many tasks on the go at once.
Everything we do in life involves a system; from the biological systems that make our bodies work, to systems that govern how money changes hands, to psychological systems that make people take us seriously or not. If we have a good working knowledge of the system we’re dealing with, we can improve our chances of success. Let’s look at the example of an entrepreneur looking for investors for a start-up. Some budding businesspeople spend hours making materials for pitches and then delivering them to potential investors. But it all comes to nothing. Their business ideas might be great, and they’ve worked hard on it. But the problem is that they don’t really understand what the investors are looking for, and what’s going to grab their attention and make them sign up. Then there are other entrepreneurs who study the system. They understand how investors operate, and they do research on individual investors they’re going to pitch to. The time they spend doing this is a lot more worthwhile than spending endless hours on changing the wording of their pitch.
A lot of people who are working hard on something but failing, just don’t understand the system they’re working with. This is true of your friend who’s an excellent employee but does poorly on job interviews. They probably haven't looked into how to impress job interviewers and give them what exactly they’re looking for. And what about that guy in the gym who’s always there, but just doesn't seem to be able to get into shape? He probably needs to study how fitness training works. Whatever the system you're dealing with, understanding it helps you get to your goal faster, cheaper, and with higher chances of success. We’re not talking about cutting corners in a way that will make the end result less valuable, or leave somebody else to pick up the mess. We’re talking about getting to the same target faster.
Think about a worker who has to deliver a spreadsheet, and spends a long time creating the entire thing from scratch. While another worker given the same task spends a few minutes finding a suitable template. And in those few minutes, half the job is already done.
The second worker is smarter because they’ve found a shortcut that will give them the same result. In fact, finding shortcuts is something you learn in basic maths at school. Think back to when you'd just learned how to do sums like this one. Your teacher then taught you that if you multiply 2 by 5, it gives you the same answer quicker. This is the same rule of thumb. Whatever your area of work, there’ll be shortcuts that help you do your job faster and more efficiently. Spend some time looking into them, because a few hours spent finding them can save you hundreds of hours in the long run.
Now, we’ve just mentioned that there are times you’ll want to make yourself available to others. But there are other times when you won’t. In fact, when you’ll want to shut yourself off completely to concentrate on the task at hand. This might be when there’s a deadline looming, when you’re working on a tight schedule, or when you want to make progress with a longer-term project. In too many workplaces, people waste time on interactions that don’t get them anywhere. If you’ve got into five conversations about your weekend before you even open up your computer, this is probably the case. And remember that phone calls, emails, and conversations on messenger can be huge distractions as well. So you should know how to block these out. Some experts even suggest that you should avoid checking your work emails first thing in the morning, and leave them until you’ve got a few key tasks taken care of.
But, to be fair, whether you want to do this depends on your workflow, and how urgent those emails are likely to be. But definitely, when you have important tasks to do, the only answer is to knuckle down and focus, and completely shut out interruptions. Smart workers know how to politely signal to colleagues that they don’t want to be interrupted. And at times they'll even switch off their phones or the internet so they can pay attention to the task they’re working on.
Procrastinating means delaying an important task, often by losing yourself in distractions. And it’s probably the biggest enemy of smart working. Everybody on earth has an in-born tendency to procrastinate. But smart workers know how to keep this tendency in check. So how can we do this? Cut off distractions. If possible, totally switch off all social networks. Organize your workplace so it’s tidy and clutter-free. If you’ve got a huge task to do that you find scary, break it down into a list of smaller, more achievable ones. This makes it appear a lot easier to dive in to. And once you’ve got going, tick smaller tasks off one by one on a list; this will give you a sense of progress. If you can do the hardest stuff first this will make the rest of it seem easy by comparison; and before you know it, you’ll be nicely on track. Take breaks, but give them a time limit. And finally, train your will power bit by bit. It does take will power to tackle intimidating tasks, but even if you don’t think will power is one of your strong points, don’t worry – it can be trained.
Think of will power like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it’s going to get. Build it up over time, and you’ll see yourself procrastinating less and less. So it looks like we’ve been arguing that working smart wins over working hard, right?
Actually, wrong. he point is that to be successful, you do have to work hard; but a lot of people do work hard, but forget to work smart. If you can do both, you’ll be giving yourself a huge advantage. And remember, working smart shouldn't involve taking advantage of anybody. Working smart means being efficient, not being sneaky.
An average corporate employee works for about 9 hours a day. But Jeff Bezos, the CEO of a trillion dollar company works only for 8 hours a day. In this fast-paced world of hustle and bustle, how does the CEO of a trillion dollar company manage to work only for eight hours a day? This is because he functions with something called the manager's mindset. A manager's mindset is when you measure the success of your work solely on the basis of the outcome that you have generated. Jeff Bezos once stated that, as a senior executive your job is not to make thousands of decisions, but to make a small number of great decisions which will impact the future of the company. And he said that at no given point of time should you ever compromise on the quality of the decision. Just take a look at this picture. Imagine you have to push a cube. You know that if only you had a sphere, you’d make things move ten times faster. A lot of people spend ages trying to figure out how to turn the cube into the ball. But the smart way isn't to try doing this, because either impossible or will take a huge amount of work. The smart way is to use a cart to carry the cube. Yet a lot of people don’t figure this out, and spend too long trying to turn the cube into a sphere. Instead of searching for a utopic sphere, just outsource a cart. Even if it comes at a price, you’ll be able to carry many more cubes, pay for the cart, and still make a profit. This is called a “Manager’s Mindset”. And that’s how it’s done..!!!
Mahima Verghese - SIBM Pune