02/03/2019
Redesign work to focus on value, quality and efficiency.
Let’s say you have a peer who is always outperforming you. You might decide to double down on your current work regimen. Instead of rethinking how you work, you’ll work harder.
However, rethinking or redesigning the way you work is exactly what you should be doing if you want to improve your output.
In the survey, 5,000 participants ranked a series of work-related statements, such as: “Reinvented their job to add more value” and “Created new opportunities in their work - new activities, new projects, new ways of doing things.” The results clearly showed that those with a willingness to redesign the way they worked performed better.
For a really beneficial redesign, you should think beyond simple productivity goals and focus on the ways in which your work provides value.
Anyone can add hours to their workday, or think in terms of dollars and cents, but a genuine redesign should find ways to generate more value – whether it’s for your customers, your teammates or your suppliers. This value can take many forms, such as streamlining a process that makes it easier for a colleague to work, or improving the development stage for new products.
So don’t just think of ways to better reach your goals or accomplish your tasks. At the end of the day, these steps could add zero value.
For example, a dentist might redesign her process to see more patients during a workday, but this could end up reducing accurate diagnoses. Similarly, a lawyer might bill a lot of hours, regardless of whether he has provided valuable counsel.
Along with this focus on value, a meaningful redesign should also find a good balance between quality and efficiency.
Quality goes hand in hand with accuracy and reliability. So, if your work involves transcribing audio recordings, don’t measure your performance by how many words you can transcribe, but rather how few mistakes you make. In this case, more accuracy equals a higher quality and better performance.
However, you don’t want to prove inefficient, either. If being accurate in your transcriptions means you only get through ten words every minute, that’s not very efficient work and, therefore, it doesn’t add much value.
