Few years back I was interviewed for job in a prestigious firm of Chartered Accountants. Interviewer told that if I am hired, lot of Hard Work will be expected from me and that I will have to sit late frequently as deadlines are tightening and work load is increasing every year. I was neither a hard worker nor believed in sitting late for office work, and it is true even today by the way. I had few other preferences as well at that time
. However, to get in place in that firm, I strongly convinced him that I am a Hard Worker and will have no issue in sitting late or coming to office on holidays. Interview panel was happy with my answer and I was inducted in the firm.
At that time I realized
that a characteristic which employers often want their employees to possess and
demonstrate is, inter alia, Hard
Work. Companies prefer to hire people who make them believe that they can work
harder than other candidates for a particular post. Although hard work is not a
decisive factor in job interviews but it is often given good weightage in hiring
process. People believe that a guy who has capacity to sit late can give more
value for money than a person who believes to leave office at 5’o clock. This
is especially common in organizations where no over time is paid for sitting
late as in case of most of service departments.
Coming back to my story, I
kept on following my rule of minimum late and minimum hard work to maximum
possible extent throughout my job in that firm. But to the surprise of my close
friends and batch mates, I was very successful there and my managers used to
quote my name as example for other students. Partner of that firm was very
happy with quality of work I delivered and recommended teams on same kind of
jobs to perform procedures that I performed on my jobs. At that time my juniors
were very impressed and they asked me secret of my success. I had one line
answer “It’s so because I am lazy”. My
colleagues could hardly believe in my statement however, I explained my point
to them which I am going to share in this post as well.
A lazy but responsible
person is ideal employee in certain cases of service provider industries. Lazy
person starts his work with one single agenda; How to complete the task with
minimum effort, maintaining quality of output. He reconsiders, innovates, improvises,
and automates the work to be done. He reconsiders existing methods of executing
the tasks. He improvises new methods to do the job in different ways. He is
innovative to do the job in a. He automates his work using different IT skills
and soft wares so he can be even more efficient. Then to bring quality in work
and to balance the efficiency – effectiveness graph, he innovates and applies
new techniques, thinks differently and tests new angles.
This theory have
successfully been tested in various organizations and companies are moving to
hiring plans which also consider how much lazy
a candidate is and how this can be beneficial to employee as well as the employer.
It is however equally important to be responsible and sensible in addition of
being lazy as combination of irresponsibility
and laziness can be the lethal one for organization as well as for career of
the employee.
