In today’s workplace, there’s a growing trend of employees seeking career progression and pay rises based on how hard they perceive they are working and how tired they are feeling.
Emerging leaders are asking questions in workshops like, “Should we reward the person who gets their job done by 4pm or the person who has a great work ethic, is working really hard, but still not quite getting the outcomes required by the business?”
So why is there a shift from rewarding outcomes to valuing effort?
Have we gone too much to the side of rewarding the work instead of the outcomes? Carol Dweck’s writings on mindset have been very influential in education, and as a result of work schools are now teaching students and parents to care more about the work being done rather than the grade itself. So if little Johnny gets an A in English – let’s reward the work that he did to get the A rather than the A itself.
I actually agree with this approach – and note the emphasis on the work he did to get the A.
However, this seems to have gone a little too far in the workplace with people now expecting to get rewards based on their work, even if they aren’t achieving the outcomes required. Of course, at school, it’s probably a lot clearer as to what activities lead to the outcomes. You literally just need to follow the textbook and the syllabus.
However, the world is constantly changing, which means many roles don’t really have a “syllabus”, and this ambiguity makes it a little harder to define what people should be working on.
Add to this the belief that hard work is productive because many of us heard this from our parents and school teachers, and it’s no wonder that people want to be rewarded for working hard.
And don’t get me started on the “everyone gets a trophy for showing up” situation!
We are also finding this problem is exacerbated by a lack of clear outcome requirements in job descriptions and performance appraisals. Without clear KPIs, people will want to be assessed on something that is clear. And of course working really long hours and feeling really tired are quite tangible.
So what to do?
Firstly, outcomes need to be very, very clear so that people understand exactly what’s expected of them (including their behaviour along the way), and how success will be measured.
Then use those outcomes to work backwards to determine the activities that need to be done to achieve those outcomes to ensure that the right things are being done.
For example when I’m coaching distribution teams, we use the annual revenue target to work backwards to determine the kinds of activities such as outbound calls, follow up calls, strategic prospecting time, meetings, conferences etc that are going to be needed to meet the goal of the “available sales days” that each sales person has each year. Often I see people have such grand plans for the activities to get their targets, but in order to hit that activity they would need 750 days in a year!
So they need to go back to the drawing board to work out what is the minimum activity required for maximum results.
Then they need to check in along the way – every month or quarter (depending on the sales cycle) they would need to make a good assessment of whether the strategy is working, or whether it needs some revising.
Obviously not all roles have such unambiguous KPIs as distribution, but we are still seeing so many people with a lack of role clarity and very, very vague KPIs. To get more clarity around that, I like to ask leaders “so exactly what would this person have accomplished, in 12 months from now, that would make you feel like they have been successful in the role?” And this should include your Key Culture Indicators in addition to the actual work that they produce.
Measure what matters
You basically get whatever you measure and reward. If you reward people for looking busy, working long hours, being really tired etc, you’ll get more of that. However we know, thanks to neuroscience, that productivity and performance increases when we have way more energy.
For example when people know how to optimise their 4 hours of power in a day, we find that these people can get done in 4 hours what would otherwise have taken them 6 hours.
I don’t know why you would want to reward the person who took 6 hours to do what could have been done in 4 hours!? It doesn’t feel good, and it costs more.
Why should we worry about this now?
People are still wearing hard work as a badge of honour. As roles get more ambiguous we need more clarity so that people can make sure they are working on the right things and not just getting better at the tasks that don’t result in outcomes.
This will save a lot of rework, and missed work which will make it easier for individuals and teams to get their outcomes with less effort and burnout. And that’s a win for everyone.
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here.