Lazy employees are more valuable than diligent ones

YOU might think the diligent, conscientious type are the best ones to work with. But you could be wrong. Here’s why your lazy desk buddy is a keeper.

DILIGENT employees have long been hailed as the ultimate employee. The industrious, hard working and committed tend to be at the top of any employer’s wish list.

Oh, how we long for diligent employees — finding them is the equivalent of corporate gold. They are the backbone of our businesses. After all, at least on paper, what’s not to like? They are autonomous, take responsibility, get done what they are supposed to with little, if any prodding and they adhere to our systems with a pious obedience.

The problem is, today many of our systems have become outdated, often before we even finish testing them. The digital age has changed everything, including the characteristics that define our most valuable employees.

We are living through a revolution.

History books are packed with the enormous changes the industrial revolution wrought and will almost certainly tell similar when looking back on this the “Digital Revolution”.

Many of today’s businesses and their employees are waking up to find they have become today’s equivalent of the blacksmith. A once critical role in every community that was the first victim of the speed of the car — not its speed on the road mind, but the speed with which it was adopted and democratised.

And yet the same kind of denial that saw many blacksmiths claiming, “the car was a mere novelty and would never replace the role of shoed horses in our lives”, is nervously being repeated as the retail world adapts to digital competition, large financial organisations now compete with crowd funding and even car ownership is being challenged by concepts like sharing (everything old is new again it seems).

What this revolution means is that we need new systems and ways of working better suited to our new reality. We require more flexible thinking, faster responses and ever evolving processes. Our workplaces desperately need a redesign and they need it fast.

Those who challenge the orthodoxy are more suited to tomorrow’s workplace.

And this is precisely the reason why the once lauded diligent employees can become a bit of a liability. The problem is, they tend not to question, agitate or innovate. They do exactly as they told, not always what they might. They follow systems and protocols, diligently. But therein lies the problem … they follow them … they rarely challenge them.

The critical issue is they can in fact be too diligent to drive the change our organisations and structures desperately require.

What we need today are people who will constantly re-evaluate, rethink and adapt our systems to the modern world of business. People who will constantly look for better ways to do what must be done.

This is where the lazy employee comes to the fore. (Note, by lazy we do not mean disengaged or checked-out, that category of employee is part of every business but are by no means your most valuable asset). What we’re interested in however is the “lazy” yet results-driven employee who will tend to look for an easier way, who will actively seek out the shortcut or try to save

time, energy and resources. They have a minimum effort, maximum result mindset.

Smart and lazy is a powerful combination. Our systems improve when clever people are lazy because superfluous steps and points of breakage and friction are streamlined or deleted entirely.

Rewarding those who work the longest hours is an archaic ideal based on a linear production model. Instead we need to be looking to those who can achieve the most, or indeed the best, in the least amount of time. Those who manage to do their jobs well and go home at a decent hour deserve a little more scrutiny to find out what they are doing that the rest are not, but could be.

Taking it too far with the whole ‘lazy’ thing.

Necessity isn’t the mother of all invention, laziness is.

Consider inventions like elevators or cars or telephones. All replaced more labour intensive practices and made our lives more efficient and freed our time up for other pursuits.

Or think about things we take for granted today, things like hot, running water — clearly a want, but hardly a need. In fact much of the world still survives without this every day luxury of the modern world.

And yet who of us today would honestly criticise the “laziness” of such a convenience? Even the most curmudgeonly complainer would find it hard to reminisce fondly about hours spent walking to the well, or nearby river, then carting it home only to have to build a fire and wait for it to heat a sufficient quantity to fill the weekly bath — particularly on a chilly winter’s day. You don’t need to consider yourself particularly lazy to view this as a lot of hard work or to appreciate the first such person who thought, “What if I could bring the water to the house and heat it on the way?” Hello hot water!

Certainly some hard work, or at least clever work, was required at some point to bring these ideas to fruition but it took a ‘lazy’ mindset to question the current way things were getting done.

Lazy employees are valuable for precisely this reason; they question, they reinvent and innovate systems that make life and work simpler, easier, more efficient and faster. And in doing so, they change our world for the better.

This is the genius of the ‘lazy’ employee.

Kieran Flanagan and Dan Gregory are the authors of Selfish, Scared & Stupid.