Hard work equates to good work?

THERE I was, sitting there staring at the back of this almost toothless man as he fiddled underneath my new office’s pantry sink.

Ah Choy, as he wanted to be called, was a plumber and he was installing the piping for my newly fitted office pantry.

He was seated on the pantry’s floor and all his tools were strewn on the floor around him and I could see he was sweating profusely due to the heat of having to cram himself underneath my pantry cupboard.

About three hours later, after going back and forth from being crammed underneath the sink to drilling holes in the wall behind the sink, he was done and he charged me a fee of RM250.

As I looked at Ah Choy while he was fiddling with the piping, I thought to myself that for some, earning a couple of hundred bucks could be REAL hard work. It is a time-consuming, energy-intensive and laborious task. And it can be a “dirty job” in the real sense of the word.

For a moment, I felt consoled (as all cost-conscious entrepreneurs would) that I did not have to pay an arm or a leg to Ah Choy for all that very messy affair of having to drill a hole in the wall to connect the drainage and piping from the washroom to the pantry.

After Ah Choy had left and I was still kind of feeling good about the affordable fee I paid for his hard work, I did another inspection of the job. It was then that I noticed I had gotten my money’s worth as the workmanship was poor and the drilling on the wall was shoddily done.

Yes, Ah Choy had spent a good three hours to do REAL hard work. But was it GOOD work?

Recently, a young entrepreneur was remarking to me about how good the employees of one of his office’s neighbours are.

I asked him why he thought so. He said he noticed that they are always working late in the office and yet, the workers seemed to show such wonderful spirits and pleasant manners when he interacted with them. They never complained about working late.

He concluded that his neighbour’s employees must be GOOD because they were willing to put in hard work.

While I do agree that success must come with some degree of hard work, I wondered about how quickly we jump to a conclusion sometimes as to what constitutes good work and how easily we equate hard work to good work.

For example, some SME business owners and entrepreneurs (people who really want to get their money’s worth) feel uneasy when they do not see their staff staying back in the office to work overtime.

When they see their staff working hard, they will automatically assume that they are good staff.

They are quick to categorise those who do not slog away in the office as the “not good” staff.

In reality, this may not be the case. The hardworking staff may not be producing good work.

They may probably be staying back in the office only because they take a longer time to complete a job that others in the same position can do faster or in a smarter way.

If only business performance can be measured by pure hard work and the number of hours put in.

Then, it will be so much more straightforward.

But if there was one thing I learned from my former American colleagues, it is that performance should be measured by results.

Hard work is needed to get results but good results cannot be obtained by just pure hard work.

Especially for SMEs and entrepreneurs who do not have the luxury of a trial and error process.

With a big staff force, it is more important for them to be results-oriented than methods or task-focused.

If we allow our staff to do the same thing repeatedly, knowing that it did not yield good results before and then applaud them for the “good work”, we are mistaken in what we perceive to be good.

Jeanisha thinks that a good litmus test we can apply to evaluate the quality of our own work before submitting it to clients, is by asking ourselves “Will I pay money for it?” If we hesitate to say yes, we know what we need to do.