Performance, not hours matter

A friend of mine often complained that her current maid did not work hard enough. I listened with a lot of empathy. I am sure all Indian women would be empathetic in such situations. The “maid” topic is a great topic of conversation and a catalyst to friendship. But as topics go, even the “maid” topic starts getting boring if its the same conversationalist and the same maid. So I started asking my friend some questions. Does your maid do whatever was her job description? Is her work clean? Is she regular? The answers to most of the questions were a grudged yes. Finally I understood that her problem was that the maid does not stay for long enough. She finishes her work very fast, though the work is ok by usual standards. I guess my friend thought that she was paying her maid as much for her time as for her work, so she assumed that because she did not stay the full hour, her maid was a work shirker.

Copy paste this to the current office work environment. And we will find that a lot of people complain that Mr or Ms X is often found watching TV in the canteen, seen loitering at the pantry with a cup of coffee, or caught on facebook or reading some magazine at his or her work desk. The first thing that comes to mind is probably-Don’t these people have work?

There premise that is built in our minds that people who work longer work more or work better has evolved after years of conditioning. This premise is a legacy of the industrial era of assembly line that output is directly proportional to the time taken. This has given rise to the concept of hourly rate. Hourly rate is the amount of money that is charged for every hour worked. For example if you need a building to be constructed, you pay the construction workers a rate on the number of hours they spend at constructing, not on the square feet they have completed constructing. If you need a lawyer to represent your case, you pay for the number of hours he or she spends on preparing your case and appearing before court not on the validity and weight of the arguments presented. If you need a software to be developed you pay the developer on the basis of the hours put in, not the milestones achieved.

This is a very flawed idea that more time means better performance. Being valued on the number of hours that one puts in, gives one the luxury of being inefficient and lazy. If something is taking a long time to get done, people think that it is a difficult and cumbersome task and the task as well as the one doing  it are viewed with respect. So under-performers often get rewarded as a result of putting more hours on a job. If you are smart, intelligent, quick and a good time manager you can afford to complete a said task in a lot lesser time. So, hours is never the right measure of work. Be it construction or software development, we should move away from the hourly rate and judge and pay on the basis of performance.

So, next time we see anyone watching cricket in the canteen, instead of grudging them their free hours, let’s respect their efficiency. Let’s take a leaf out of their book and learn the recipe of good time management and good performance.