Don’t work harder, Work SMARTER!
Without fail, every time we come to a point the project where we have a lot of work (often more than the current team can do) and have little time left, management will say “Hey guys, don’t work harder, work smarter”. What does this really mean? To me this means that the “dumb” ones will not have a job next month because they did not get the work done. This also means that we are expected to work until the job is done, it is not a question of working “harder” but a comment that if you are “smart” you will get this work done irrespective of how hard you work because in the long run the smart employees still have the jobs!
Even if, and this could be true, management meant that we should find ways to become more efficient and do the same task in less time and optimize what we are doing so we are not working on useless tasks. This could be the case but I doubt it, for two main reasons. If we could be more efficient wouldn’t we have been more efficient all along also if we could do things to become more efficient we certainly should not work on them in a crunch time because that would slow our perspective progress to the finish line. I also think that if we could eliminate the useless tasks then the managers would have no data to present to upper management because we would not be busy enabling data collection.
To combat this you could respond with the following comments:
- “If I was to work ‘smarter’ what would that mean?” (maybe to direct)
- “Does ‘smarter’ mean that you are at home and I am here at work?” (make sure to use air quotes)
- “Here, could you help me complete this?” (giving all your work to your boss, now you
- are free to do what you like)
- “What about your charts? Can you make them ‘smarter’?”
Just a few tips to help you defuse the “Work Smarter not Harder” comment. Do you have any more to share?
