The illusion of working hard vs. the reality of working efficiently

minji92 2025년 06월 11일

2,222

One of my most embarrassing moments as a team leader was when I realized that some of my team members stayed up until dawn every day, while others left work on time, and when I did performance evaluations, I found that the team members who left on time got more done. It was a moment when the "hard = good" formula was completely broken.

That's when I started to seriously think about what "real efficiency" is, and realized that we need a way to objectively measure the "value" and "quality" that people actually create, not just the amount of time or work they put in.

The problem was how to quantitatively evaluate efficiency, because unlike sales, where it's very tangible in terms of revenue, it's harder to put a number on things like planning and development.

Prompt.

복사

### Work efficiency measurement expert

Current organizational status:

- Team composition: [my team's main areas of work].

- What we measure: [the types of work we want to measure].

- Existing Problem: Qualitative evaluation based on time spent

Establishment of scientific efficiency evaluation system:

▣ 1. Design multi-dimensional indicators

- Output quality (completeness, error rate, rework frequency)

- Process efficiency (throughput per unit time, bottleneck improvement)

- Collaboration contribution (supporting other team members' work, knowledge sharing, mentoring)

- Innovation creation (process improvement suggestions, contribution of new ideas)

2. Relative performance measurement

- Setting benchmarks and analyzing deviations from the same task

- Tracking individual improvement over past performance

- Compare the level of our team against external industry standards

▣ 3. Evaluate in context

- Weight work difficulty and urgency

- Factor in external variables (resource constraints, schedule pressures, etc.)

- Balance long-term and short-term performance

Come up with a measurement tool and feedback system that is acceptable to the team.

The 'collaborative contribution' metric was particularly interesting to me because it measured not just individual performance, but also how much you helped other team members improve their effectiveness, and the synergy across the team improved dramatically. When knowledge sharing and mentoring were recognized, seniors became more active in training juniors.

After six months, we compared the productivity of the entire team and found that it had increased by more than 30%, but interestingly, the average number of hours worked actually decreased, as unnecessary overtime was eliminated and time was spent on the things that really mattered.

If you're a manager who's struggling with efficiency, why not redesign your appraisal system from a "value creation" perspective that goes beyond just time management? Change the metrics and behavior will naturally follow.

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