What is work?
Is it place? Is it effort and energy? Is it anything done in an effort to achieve a goal? Is there such thing as working for yourself or do we all work for someone else?
Dictionary Definition
work [ wurk ]
1. paid job: paid employment at a job
2. duties of job: the duties or activities that are part of a job or occupation
3. somebody’s place of employment: the place where somebody is employed
Jullien’s Definition
What is work?
Work is the process of changing or moving an individual, organization, or thing from state (what it is) to state B (toward what it wants to be) or from point A (where it is) to point B (toward where it wants to be).
Work makes things-organizations, products, processes, services, and people- work better to serve their intended purpose. It strives to limit inefficiencies and costs or it improves efficiencies and revenues, and thus value and profits.
Work is not a job (I have work) or a place to go to (I’m going to work). Many people have jobs where no work is getting done. Work has two criteria—1. It is an action and 2. That action causes a positive result. We use time to direct skills at a problem that will accelerate the business (value creation and capture) of my organization.
In physics, mechanical work is the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance in the direction of the force. But from an economic standpoint, expended energy or time without a positive shift in direction is not work. It’s effort. Effort doesn’t always lead to state/point B. Effort without results doesn’t mean time and energy was wasted either. If lessons are derived (the greatest being how and where to reallocate time and energy) then the experience can still be valuable.
Value is when an individual or organization can do work faster, safer, or cheaper than the entity could do it on their own. Faster saves time, our most valuable resource. Safer limits risks and increases comfort. And cheaper saves money, a temporary storer of past value.
Many American workers expect to get paid for just showing up. That may work (no pun intended) for awhile in a company or economy where other people are actually working, but it’s not sustainable long term. Either the worker gets fired or other workers begin adopting the mindset of “give the greatest reward for the least amount of effort” and the organization crumbles with them.
How much work actually gets done in a 40 hour work week? Its definitely not 40 hours. Can a worker show that they have created value on a monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly basis? It can be difficult in the short term for a few reasons:
1. Everything the worker needs to get the work done is usually not in their control (e.g. a pilot and bad weather)
2. The visible change doesn’t always occur the moment the work is done (e.g. a farmer and a seed)
3. Cause and effect aren’t always or easily visible (e.g. Did he cause that or did the stars just align?)
Sometimes the worker is doing the work they were told to do but the boss had them focus on the wrong thing. In this case, usually the worker gets blamed and fired though it’s not their fault. They made progress, just not in the desired direction.
Sometimes the boss directs them in the right way but the worker can’t do the work. This is due to lack of skills and motivation. Lack of skills for today’s work is an HR and education issue. Lack of skills for tomorrow’s work is a CEO issue. And motivation is a manager, team, and individual issue.
Until everyone accepts responsibility for their work, everything will fall on the individual. Companies will blame prospective employees for not being prepared to do the work and employees will blame their education. Companies will blame current employees for failing to do the work and employees will blame management and the economy.
Rather than saying that this didn’t happen because of this, this, and this, work causes things to happen. Workers are intended to be the cause—that is their purpose. A true worker doesn’t allow becauses to get in the way of their causes. In essence, all workers have a cause (though that word has been co-opted to mean social-oriented) and their results will reflect the extent they are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated by the cause they were hired to solve.
Every worker has a cause. What’s yours?
