Principles

When work is not getting finished in a company, the simplest solution can seem to be working more.

People work longer days. They take work home. They hold evening meetings. They postpone holidays. More people are hired, who in turn begin doing even more activities.

For a while, it may seem that the company really is moving faster.

But the number of hours worked does not indicate the quality of a company. It only indicates how much of people's time the company uses.

The question is not how many hours people work.

The question is how much value is created during those hours.

A company that needs ever more working hours to achieve the same result may not be growing. It may simply be getting bigger as a system that is more expensive, more complex and drains more energy from people.

Working hours measure input, not results

An hour worked is a cost to the company.

The result is the value created during that time.

The two are not automatically connected.

One person may solve in two hours a problem that takes another person two weeks. One timely decision may save a team hundreds of working hours. One poorly chosen project may consume the time of dozens of people for months and ultimately create no value for the company.

Working hours, however, are easy to measure.

It is much harder to measure:

- whether the right work was done; - whether the root cause of the problem was solved; - whether the result helped the company move closer to its goal; - whether the solution created can be used repeatedly; - whether the work reduced or increased the future workload; - whether someone could have achieved the same result more simply.

This is why many companies are managed according to what is easiest to see.

A manager sees who arrived early, who sent the last email in the evening and whose calendar is full of meetings. They may not see that some of this work should not exist at all.

This creates a situation in which busyness becomes evidence of commitment and a long working day appears more valuable than a well-considered, brief intervention.

But customers do not pay a company for people's effort.

Customers pay for results.

More work may mean doing more of the wrong things

If the strategy is unclear, a longer working day will not solve the problem.

It merely accelerates activities whose necessity no one is certain of.

If a company has ten priorities at once, extra hours do not make those priorities any clearer. People spread their attention across even more activities, constantly switch contexts and end the day feeling that they did a great deal but completed nothing properly.

If the wrong customer has been chosen, serving them at greater volume will not make them more profitable for the company.

If a product does not solve a sufficiently important problem, more development hours do not automatically create a better product.

If a process is flawed, a higher volume of work usually means repeating the same error more often.

Before increasing the pace of work, the company must therefore ask whether it is moving in the right direction at all.

A bad system does not become good when people work harder within it.

It simply produces more confusion, faster.

Overtime often conceals a management problem

Constant overwork is usually justified by staff shortages or high demand.

Sometimes that is true.

But very often, the real reason lies elsewhere:

- goals are unclear; - priorities change constantly; - responsibility has not been agreed; - decisions are held up by managers; - people do overlapping work; - meetings do not result in decisions; - effective processes are missing; - tools do not fit the actual work; - the wrong people are in the wrong roles; - quality problems cause constant rework; - management starts more projects than the company can finish.

In such a company, the employees are not slow.

The company itself makes work slow.

A person may be highly committed, but if they have to wait for the approval of three managers to get one decision, a longer working day will solve nothing.

If the necessary information is scattered across different people's inboxes, spreadsheets and personal notes, much of the time is spent searching for information instead of doing the work.

If areas of responsibility are unclear, several people do the same thing or everyone assumes that someone else is handling it.

The manager sees the delay and asks for more effort.

In reality, they should fix the system in which that effort is being made.

Heroics can become a company's operating model

Young companies go through periods when people genuinely do need to work more than usual.

An important customer needs a quick solution. A product must be brought to market. A critical technical problem must be fixed. The company's survival may depend on the effort made over a few days or weeks.

The problem is not temporary effort.

The problem arises when exceptional effort becomes the normal operating model.

If every deadline requires a last-minute rescue operation, the company is not fast. It does not know how to plan.

If every customer problem has to be solved by the CEO or the most experienced employee, the company is not customer-centric. It lacks an effective system.

If the same people rescue the company week after week, that does not only demonstrate their strength. It also shows that management has begun using their commitment to compensate for a flawed operating model.

Heroic effort is dangerously convenient.

It resolves the visible crisis and allows the real cause to remain unfixed. The work gets done, the customer calms down and management moves on to the next problem.

After a while, firefighting becomes the company's primary management method.

More people do not automatically solve a workload problem

When there is too much work, hiring more people seems logical.

But first, the company must understand where the work actually comes from.

When new hires enter an unclear system, the need for coordination grows along with their number. There are more meetings, more exchanges of information, more dependencies and more decisions.

The manager's workload does not decrease. It may increase instead.

Ten people doing unclear work do not necessarily create more value than five people with a clear goal, responsibility and decision-making authority.

A problem perceived as a staff shortage may actually be:

- a priority problem; - a process problem; - a competence problem; - a management problem; - unautomated repetitive work; - a poorly designed service; - a customer base with too many exceptions; - a strategic choice left undecided.

Adding people before understanding the problem simply makes inefficiency more expensive.

First, remove the work that does not need to be done. Then simplify the necessary work. Automate the repetitive part. Give responsibility to the right person. Only then decide whether more people are genuinely needed to do the work.

The wrong people create more working hours

Not everyone is equally good at every task.

That does not make anyone a bad employee. It means that a person's capabilities, the nature of the work and their responsibility must fit together.

A person may be highly capable, but in the wrong role they need more time, support and supervision to achieve the same result. The work tires them more, the likelihood of errors increases and the quality of the result fluctuates.

This then creates work for other people:

- someone checks; - someone corrects; - someone explains again; - someone reassures the customer; - someone completes the missing parts themselves; - the manager intervenes and takes back responsibility.

One poor match between a person and their work does not only consume that person's time. It creates additional work throughout the system.

Workload should therefore not be assessed solely by how many tasks someone has.

The company must look at whether the right people are doing the right things.

A good fit does not only mean that a person knows how to do the work. They must be able to do it with the required quality, speed and independence, without the rest of the organisation constantly having to compensate for what is missing.

A tired person does not create more value

There is a limit to adding working hours.

Beyond that point, the value created no longer grows. Errors, rework, irritability and a decline in decision quality do.

A tired person may stay at work longer, but they:

- notice less; - choose the easier solution rather than the better one; - avoid difficult decisions; - communicate less precisely; - react more emotionally; - repeat mistakes already made; - create solutions that have to be fixed later.

This is particularly important in knowledge work.

It may take ten minutes to make a poorly considered decision. Correcting its consequences may take months.

When a company values presence more than the quality of thinking, people begin optimising for visible effort. They fill their calendars, reply to messages late and attend meetings where their presence is not actually needed.

The company gets more working hours but less clear thinking.

Managers must stop rewarding effort instead of results

If a manager constantly praises those who “gave it everything” but does not ask why such effort was needed in the first place, they teach the organisation the wrong behaviour.

People learn that the most visible value is created in a crisis.

No one receives special recognition because a process worked, a problem was avoided or work was completed calmly by the deadline. Recognition goes to the person who worked through the night to solve a last-minute problem.

The company then begins unconsciously producing situations in which heroics are necessary.

A good manager does not only ask: “Who will get this done?”

They also ask:

- Why did this work arise? - Does it need to be done at all? - Why did this problem become visible so late? - Has the same problem occurred before? - Which decision was not made in time? - Was responsibility clear? - Can the process prevent the problem next time? - Can the work be removed, simplified or automated? - Is the right person doing it?

The goal is not to make people care less.

The goal is to stop wasting their commitment.

The hallmark of a better company is not less effort but greater leverage

A good company is not a place where no one makes an effort.

A good company uses people's effort where it creates the most value.

This means that:

- the company has a clear goal; - a small number of genuine priorities have been chosen; - people know which result they are responsible for; - decisions are made as close to the work as possible; - processes remove recurring confusion; - tools support the work rather than add new work; - the right people do tasks suited to them; - results are measured by value created rather than busyness; - repetitive work is automated; - unnecessary work is stopped.

In such a company, every additional percentage point of growth does not have to come from buying more working hours.

The same team can create more value because less of its time is spent waiting, searching, coordinating, correcting and doing pointless work.

That is a growing company.

Not an organisation where people run faster and faster, but a system that creates ever more value from every hour they work.

Look at the system before demanding more work

If work is constantly left unfinished in a company, a manager's first question should not be: “How can people get more done?”

The first question should be: “Why does our company require so much work to achieve this result?”

Perhaps people do not need to work harder.

Perhaps management finally needs to make the choices it has avoided so far.

End unnecessary projects. Clarify responsibility. Fix processes. Move people out of the wrong roles. Give decision-making authority to those who have the necessary information. Remove work that creates no value for the customer or the company.

More working hours may help a company survive a temporary crisis.

But if more work is needed all the time, the problem is not people's willingness to work.

The problem is how the company is built.

A better company is not created by people giving it an ever greater share of their lives.

A better company creates more value in the same amount of time because it does fewer of the wrong things and more of the right things in the right way.

Mikk OrglaanChalleng.ist