This analysis is a development on original work carried out by John Sterman (Nobody Ever Got Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement, Repenning and Sterman) that looks at the work harder trap – why heroes working harder to overcome high work loads can permanently damage the business, more so than management think.

This article is the first of a set that explores the reasons why business development is such a tough nut to crack when implementing beneficial change and recommending strategies to overcome these problems. It sets the scene for the analysis by explaining the situation many businesses find themselves in – a tough problem – should the organisation work harder or work smarter? The situation is complicated, so apologies if the article seems long. It does have pictures though!

The analysis starts with the statement that an organisation’s work performance depends on the organisation’s work capability.
 
Work performance is defined as the amount of work the organisation is able to deliver – and work capability is defined as the ability of the organisation to work at a given level of productivity.

The relationship is shown in the diagram below as a line connecting work capability to work performance with an ‘S’ (for supporting) written over the line. Within a reasonable range, if work capability increases so work performance increases; if work capability falls, work performance falls.

The organisation has a workload – an amount of work to be done. In a business development organisation this includes marketing, various projects to develop collateral, organise seminars, sales visits, development of product demonstrations, and proposal writing.
 
The workload and the work performance may not balance – leading to a performance gap. As the workload increases so the gap increases, as the work performance increases the performance gap decreases (shown with an ‘O’ for opposes on the line). If the performance gap is positive (the workload is greater than the work performance) then work does not get completed in time, deadlines are missed and a backlog begins to build up.

In a sales organisation the workload depends on the rate of sales and the organisation’s sales capability.

The rate of sales (how much money must be brought in over the next month, or whatever time period is suitable for the business under analysis) depends on the sales targets set at the beginning of each planning period and the amount of sales already made that period. The required rate of sales will increase if sales do not meet the required rate of sales, and will decrease if the sales made exceed the rate of sales.

This reflects the reality of many organisations where sales are not consistent across the year – the first quarter is often quiet (indicating that sales targets will not be met if that trend continues) and only in the last quarter, with a push and shove, are sales targets made. With such a profile the required rate of sales steadily increases and builds pressure throughout the year, increasing the workload and forcing a very busy last quarter. (It may also be noted that many businesses offer discounts in their last quarter to encourage customers to buy, thus possibly robbing customers from the first quarter of next year – explaining why the first quarter is so quiet, and also encouraging those customers in the know to wait until the last quarter for access to a bargain).

The sales capability is a measure of how much work is needed to make a given value of sales. The rate of sales sets out how many sales are needed, and the capability is used to calculate the workload needed to deliver that rate. If the sales capability increases then the workload decreases because the organisation is more capable, it can sell with less effort.

Management abhor a performance gap – one that leads to incomplete work, or planned work missing deadlines. So a common approach to close the gap is to encourage staff to work harder. The greater the performance gap the greater the encouragement. And the more hard work put in the more work performance improves, reducing the gap and ensuring that work completes on time.
 
We have our first balancing loop – B1 below. The loop adjusts the work performance to compensate for any increase in the workload. The loop is fairly immediate in its effect – if a given day has a lot to do then with a little extra work that same day the performance gap will be closed. And as soon as the pressure is off the organisation does not need to work harder, immediately reducing work performance to meet the new lower demand.

 There is an alternative way to close the performance gap - working smarter. This commonly involves running a continuous improvement project to improve the way the organisation works, developing the organisation’s work capability, improving work performance and reducing the performance gap. This forms another balancing loop, B2 – illustrated below.

Improving work capability is a more permanent solution than working harder.

This permanence ensures that investment in working smarter pay back many times over. As a smarter capability delivers improved work performance, each time work is carried out the organisation counts the benefit of the smarter capability.

However, there is a problem in that the benefits from working smarter take time to be realised – there is a delay between commissioning a project, its successful completion and realisation of benefits. And of course, many organisations cannot guarantee a success each time they run an improvement project – often due to a lack of capability in running such projects.

Working smarter can also be used to improve sales capability, again with a delay in benefit realisation – and through this reduce the workload required to meet a required rate of sales. This gives us another balancing loop – B3 - shown below.

So the analysis so far suggests that management are faced with two choices when the workload increases:

• Work a bit harder to clear the current work load, accept that personal life outside work will be affected, and accept that some longer-term work may not get done. Solve the performance gap problem right now.
  
• Work on improving capability. Launch an improvement project. Accept that while the project is running, staff will be diverted away from doing their work, that the backlog of work will get worse, that the project may have a 50% chance of failure (or whatever the failure rate is in the organisation), and that even if successful, the project may have over-estimated its impact on performance and the benefits it can deliver.

It is clear why work harder is the easier of the two choices. Yet it might not be the wisest. Why? In part two we will look at the link between working harder and smarter and why working harder might damage the business.