Employers across East Africa routinely praise those employees who they see arriving early, leave the office later than others, responds to emails at all hours, work through lunch times, and always appear busy at their workstation.
Then when it becomes time to dish out promotions, those same managers look around the office and tend to remember who they view as working the hardest.
However, management must stop and ask whether work hard has any relationship to performing well too.
Prolific management researchers Chad Van Iddekinge, John Arnold, Herman Aguinis, Jonas Lang, and Filip Lievens published an often cited and highly impactful study that has really changed the thinking of human resources researchers and practitioners across the world.
The study defines what workplace effort actually means and what makes employees actually exert that effort. Then even more importantly, does work effort really produce better professional performance.
While such questions may seem obvious to the casual observer, these conundrums have fascinated and challenged researchers and management consultants for decades. Often people intermix three concepts altogether but are actually very different and distinct from each other: motivation, effort, and performance.
Motivation happens within an employee’s head. It is what they eagerly want to achieve in a set of work tasks. While effort then encompasses what staff subsequently does each day in their roles. Then last, performance concerns how well the actions taken on the tasks actually contribute toward accomplishing the work that needs to get done.
So, someone can really be highly motivated but surprisingly exert very little effort, while someone else could put enormous effort into their job but still perform terribly. As an example, a salesperson could make 70 cold calls to potential new insurance clients in a week while a different sales agent only makes 25. But who actually works harder?
One may think the first salesperson worked harder. But maybe the second one was more intentional, spent time networking and developing social capital to secure high probability prospective clients to call rather than just merely calling random people out of the blue. As a result, the second salesperson might convert 10 of the calls to new clients while the first one maybe only 5. Therefore, the second sales agent in reality performs better.
The research utilises the above distinction between effort and effectiveness. While effort concerns how hard someone works, performance concerns how well that same work contributes toward the organisation’s goals.
The distinction between the two becomes important because managers often only reward visible effort instead of real performance. We can quite easily notice a colleague who stays late in the office, but it is harder to see someone who intelligently finishes everything early.
So, the research divides effort into three different categories. First, what direction is the effort? Essentially, where do you put your effort.
Secondly, what kind of intensity is the effort? Meaning how hard do you work. Third, the persistence involved with the effort. How long do you keep going?
Of the big three, managers often neglect to notice and investigate direction the most. An accountant might receive 10 different tasks, and he works extremely hard for eight hours, but those whole eight hours are spent on the least important task. So, his prioritisation incompetence means he has terrible direction with his effort. But all the while his intensity and persistence are both excellent.
In contrast, a different worker first meticulously determines which two out of the 10 activities will produce her the most, so she completes only those and then moves down the priority list.
Managers may just simply describe the difference between the two workers as working hard versus working smart. But research explains deeper in that direction means selecting where to put your energy, while intensity and persistence both concern how hard you then pursue it.
In summary, do not merely ask your staff whether they work hard. But instead, ask what they work hard on doing.