Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder
You’ve heard it a thousand times:
“There is no substitute for hard work.”
As a culture, we’ve defined the value of hard work in dozens of ways: Hard work builds character. It helps you achieve your goals. Hard work beats talent, and makes things happen. It leads to success and brings fulfillment.
However, it’s important to remember that hard work and productivity are two very different things.
Best-selling author and business consultant Robin Sharma wrote, “Don’t confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy.” Sharma perfectly illustrates the misconception shared by many employers and employees – hard work must mean a lot of work. If they aren’t skipping breaks, staying nights, and crunching to make deadlines, they aren’t working hard enough.
While being a hard worker is certainly admirable, it should not be the metric by which organizations measure their success. Think of it this way: two lumberjacks head out into the forest: one carrying an axe and the other carrying a chainsaw. The one with the axe works 4 times as hard but ends the day with half as many logs.
Which employee would you rather have working for you?
“Working hard doesn’t save the day; it uses it up.”
— Simon Sinek
Five Ways to Work Smarter
Work S.M.A.R.T., Literally
Created in 1981 for Management Review magazine, the S.M.A.R.T. framework requires that goals be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timed. These criteria are designed to ensure that employees have a clear understanding of exactly what is expected of them while also giving employers a measurable metric to gauge performance and productivity.
Ditch the Paper
Clutter isn’t just distracting; it can seriously hurt your productivity. Whether it’s your daily schedule, timesheets, or HR documents, with paper, you’re always one spilled coffee away from disaster. Digital filing systems like VisualDMS from VCS keep your documents secure, backed up, and organized, and give you the ability to distribute them to your workforce with the click of a button.
Leverage Productivity Tools
It can be hard enough to stay on top of your own responsibilities, let alone trying to manage the specific tasks and equipment assigned to dozens of individuals. How can you hope to optimize the process when you can barely get your head around it in the first place?
Digital productivity tools like VCS’s Workloads software let you see the big picture of your team’s daily assignments and identify places where minor changes could mean major productivity increases.
Choose the Right People for the Job
Don’t send a master electrician to do a forklift operator’s job; it’s obvious, right? But last-minute callouts mean scrambling to fill shifts, and mistakes happen. A more likely scenario might be that the forklift driver you have filling that shift has a lapsed certification. Suddenly, you’ve got a lawsuit on your hands.
Scheduling software allows you to fill your shifts based on both employee availability and skillset, and with tools like VCS’s VisualLMS module, you can even track certification expiration dates to ensure you always have qualified employees working your shifts.
Automate, Automate, Automate
Now that you know which employees are qualified and available to fill your shifts, how do you choose which one gets the work? If you’re still reaching for a Rolodex and making individual calls, you’re not only wasting time but also opening yourself up to compliance issues.
Tools like Shift Bidding and Validation and Compliance Manager from VCS take the whole process off your plate, selecting employees based on availability and skillset, automatically notifying them of the available shifts and enforcing labor and union rules at the same time.
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
—Stephen Covey
The tools for smarter work are out there. Don’t deny yourself the rewards of a successful, organized, efficient business for the sake of the grind. Upgrade your axe to a chainsaw with intelligent workforce management solutions from VCS.