NR Narayana Murthy is an industry statesman who, among many other things, has walked the talk on hard labour. We now know from his wife Sudha Murty that the Infosys founder has always worked 80-90 hours a week and has said what he firmly believed in. This is in reference to the split opinion about Murthy’s assertion last week that Indian youth should work at least 70 hours a week to improve the country’s productivity.
That may remind many of what their parents always said, “Keep your head down, work hard, and work some more, and you will be recognised.” The parents, of course, were also walking the talk, as they put in long hours during their working days, with a relentless commitment to achieving their dreams.
Unfortunately, however, the world has changed, and there are hardly any takers for this heads-down, work-hard theory. It’s nobody’s case that hard work isn’t necessary—of course it is. But it’s equally true that hard work has been romanticised far too much for far too long. In the business world, idioms about how sleep is for the weak or how no amount of talent can supersede hard work were doled out for decades.
In his book The Seductive Illusion of Hard Work, Utkarsh Amitabh said that the underlying assumption is that if you worked hard enough for long enough, you would succeed. However, this advice misses one big point: Most people fail not because of a lack of effort but because their effort is misdirected or misaligned with their interests.
For every company CEO, the idea should be to avoid a culture that blindly worships overwork because in such an environment, people internalise crazy hours as the norm. Grinding out 100-hour weeks for years helps people think of themselves as tougher and more dedicated than everyone else. While many leaders strongly believe overwork is a credential of prosperity, data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that working harder has nothing to do with working better. For example, the Greeks are some of the most hard-working in OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But their productivity is about 70% higher. By the way, the working hours in Germany are much less than what Mr Murthy suggests.
Here’s another piece of data. Workers in the US put in more hours at work and take fewer vacation days than those in most industrialised countries. But the US isn’t the most productive country in the world. When it comes to full productivity, France wins, working only 40 hours a week with lots of vacation.
It’s thus quite obvious that there is just no point in having people moving like a launched missile throughout the working day in the hope that the boss would be mighty impressed with their permanent state of busy-ness. The danger could be that the boss concerned might end up with a bunch of multi-tasking, fast-forwarding zombies, who are always banging the lift button till it stops working.
The solution, many say, is not to work hard but to work smart. And one of the tools to do this is adopting the Pareto principle, or the 80:20 rule. The principle suggests you focus on the 20% that produces 80% of your results. When the fire drills of the day begin to sap your time, spare a minute to figure out your priorities.
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto went on to comment that 20% of his garden’s pea plants produced 80% of the peas he grew. Researching further, Pareto found that in just about any event, roughly 80% of the effects come from just 20% of the causes. Although this ratio is not constant and the proportions may vary, the pattern is broadly followed in almost every activity in which small efforts generate non-scalar returns.
For example, a company’s salesperson can work really hard by making cold calls, chasing people relentlessly, and following up with innumerable number of clients on orders that may never get closed. But all that hard work will count for nothing if he doesn’t get enough orders. A smarter approach could be to build stronger relationships with a few reliable clients, give them excellent service, resolve their queries in time, and aim for minimal complaints. That might result in clients coming back to you. That’s 80:20 for you.
Too many hard-working managers are constantly busy doing work that can be done by their juniors, can wait, or can be outsourced. In trying to focus equal attention on micro-details of every project, many managers do work that is not commensurate with their designation. They are, in effect, becoming hard-working clerks; worse, they don’t allow others in the organisation to think.
In an only work-hard regime, supervisors and staff implement a template and repeat the same steps. Smart work, on the other hand, is about increasing quality and flexibility; it’s about testing new ideas and methods, and may result in greater outcomes at a lower cost than hard work. In any case, today, we have technology, tools, and strategies to help us work faster and achieve similar or even better results.
Hard-working types often make one common mistake—they chase perfection in whatever they do. The problem is there is no end to being trying to be perfect. Some pragmatism is in order here. Also, studies show that striving to be perfect all the time can ultimately lead to burnout, which continues to be a key driver of why many people are saying “I quit” and walking out the door.
At the end of the day, the question to ask is this: While it’s good to feel busy, is the busy-ness being spent switching from task to task, not making forward progress on any one task? Bertrand Russell had said long ago that working less will guarantee “happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia”. That may be a utopian thought, but let’s not confuse being busy with being effective.
Shyamal Majumdar, shyamal.majumdar@expressindia.com