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Seneca: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”
Understanding Effectiveness vs Efficiency at Work helps us reaching our goals and moving forward, and in the end, gain more time. Have you ever wondered how you can use principles of “effectiveness”/“effectivity” and “efficiency” in connection with your work or simply within your workplace? What do these terms mean and how can you use them for yourself?
Let’s kick things off with the official business definitions of effectiveness and efficiency. From there, we’ll explore their key differences and how understanding these can transform your work approach.
I’ll also share my top tips and tricks for boosting both effectiveness and efficiency, equipping you to reclaim your valuable time. By the end of this post, you’ll have clear guidelines on where to direct your focus and actionable steps to optimize your productivity. Let’s discover, what Effectiveness vs Efficiency at Work really means!
I. What is “Effectiveness” or “Effectivity”?
Effectiveness is a measure of target achievement. It describes the relationship between actions, results and targets. The action can be something you do by using your resources, the result is the impact of your action and the targets are set in advance.
The better you achieve your target and the better the results you produce match your target, the more effective you are. “Better” often means the most direct way, without any detours. So, effectiveness is directed towards the target.
Be honest, how often do you do things at your daily work that are not necessary in the end? For whatever reasons… Did you exaggerate with (side) calculations, formulas, formats, extra slides, backup’s or extreme fancy designs to impress somebody? Or do you do more than necessary out of fear from failure or negative feedback?
II. What is “Efficiency”?
Efficiency describes how you utilize the potential of certain procedures or resources.
The best result is either achieved with your given resources or your wanted result is achieved with minimal resources.
Everytime, you have a given (effective) approach for some task at work, efficiency then is the way to save time, costs and enhance the speed while performing that task or activity.
Let’s say you work on a specific Excel analysis. You know how to do it. But there might be ways that can speed up the analysis, e.g. specific shortcuts, functions or Add-ins that can accelerate the whole analysis maybe.
Still, effectiveness would imply that the analysis as a whole is the right analysis to reach your goal. You can do the whole analysis efficiently, but if the analysis itself was not the right one, then you were efficient, but not effective.
On gainmoretime.com you’ll find plenty of tips and tricks on how to be more efficient and effective in your daily job or in general.
III. Effectiveness vs Efficiency – what’s the difference?
Effective activities are always oriented towards the target, that’s why they are called the “right” things. It is “right” for you if it brings you closer to your goal. So, effectiveness refers to certain activities, the “what”.
Efficiency always asks for the improvements in the process of doing things, which is why efficiency is sometimes referred to as “doing things right”, so it’s rather referred to as “how”.
In a nutshell, effectiveness is doing the right things, while efficiency is about doing things right. Now, let’s look at some practical examples!
IV. How can you be more effective in your workplace?
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu, …
Here are 3 simple tips, that I learned during my career, which helped me a lot throughout my career:
1. The Voice of the Customer
This is a concept from Six Sigma, a quality and process improvement methodology, developed by Motorola and further developed under Jack Welch from General Electrics. The “Voice of the Customer” or VOC has been deeply imprinted in me during my more than 5 years in Lean Six Sigma Consulting.
In the end we need to understand one thing very well: what the customer wants. And your customer can be an internal customer like your boss or manager or it can be a typical external customer.
Pay attention to what our internal and external customers pay attention to. So, if your manager always looks for fancy designs in the first draft already and not so much on the content, give him that. Maybe he wants to show other stakeholders the “look and feel” upfront.
But maybe your manager pays attention to many details and you should back up your numbers quite well at first as your manager does not want to be embarrassed in front of other internal or external customers that wrong numbers or sources have been used.
Understand what’s important to your boss and get these things done first and build habits to fulfill that criteria always.
2. Assess the risks of the most direct way
You have a task and the data and you set an easy target structure for your result. Then you purposely and directly search your data, information and facts to support that structure. Sometimes you backup a hypothesis, sometimes you create a draft of what a result could look like.
Sometimes you don’t need data. This all depends on what your “customer” wants, see above.
But the point is: decompose only to the level where you can make a (backed up) statement already, then go into discussion with your “customer”. Deliver a fast result at first, but really be “lazy” in terms of perfectionism. Create a minimal viable product (“MVP”) or draft that is then open for alignment and feedback.
When you create these fast results, you always have to think about the risk of missing a certain angle of the problem. But be pragmatic or: learn to be pragmatic. You can minimize this risk by thinking about its severity and the likelihood of occurrence of that risk.
So, what happens in the worst case, if you leave out certain data/information in the analysis? Maybe you find a reason you argue it for your first draft.
Approaching tasks more “top-down” in the past years has helped me gain more time.
The way it can be done easily is by managing out possible risk, which I describe next.
3. Manage expectations
For the things you don’t yet know regarding a task, you can manage expectations. When assigned a task you first make a draft plan on how you would approach it:
Think about
- the inputs,
- the approach,
- the tools you need,
- the result and its structure
If you do not have too much experience at first, it’s helpful to agree on the approach with the person who gave you the task. Maybe they have a different approach and you learn from them.
Assess which information can be gathered quickly and which information needs more time to be gathered: e.g. via other people’s availability, a data source you don’t have access to yet… Address all obstacles to the person who gave you the task and find an agreement.
This is not only applicable if you are a team member and have people above you. It’s also applicable as an entrepreneur or as a superior/manager. In these cases, many times the external customer defines what you really should do, i.e. what he actually pays for and what’s worth to him to go the extra mile maybe (budget, scope). Understand, negotiate and agree on it. He is your “boss”.
V. How can you be more efficient in your workplace?
There are many interesting factors and levers for efficiency at work. I want to mention 3 here, that, for some reason do not seem obvious to everyone. But there will be a separate post with more of them for you!
1. Exploit Relevant Tools
If you master the tools for your work, you’ll be done more quickly. Sometimes, mastering a tool will be a necessary condition for performing a task. But often, tools offer more or there are tools that nobody knows about and that you can use to give the work an extra turbo boost.
Getting the turbo boost should be your ultimate goal as this helps you massively gain time at your daily job and you can concentrate on steps to advance your career. Examples: Microsoft Office program Add Ins, special data aggregation tools, process automatization tools, the use of AI, etc.
2. Avoid Distractions
Eliminate distractions from your workplace. Sometimes we have too many lists, notes or other stuff on our desks. Your mind is then occupied with fear of all these different things that need to get done. Put things in order. Have things on one list. Oftentimes the reason will also be our smartphone.
The way you eliminate distractions is usually not quite so simple. You can set yourself rules, e.g. a rule for the day that you can take a look on your smartphone only after finishing one task after another from your achievement / To Do list. Or you schedule specific breaks where you use your smartphone.
Having rules is a good thing, but I also realized that the real sustainable game changer in this sense is to change your mindset and your habits in order to train your brain differently. This is a topic for another post 😉 –> subscribe to the newsletter
3. Use Repetitions as a Chance to Learn Fast
Everytime you realize repetition in your job, there is a chance to gain more time. Repeated projects, repeated tasks, repeated use of certain tools: become good at it by making notes and asking many questions when you do it the first time! This will ensure your progress goes through the roof from the next time you do it!
These are 3 important “time gainers”. There will be more posts on efficiency and productivity soon. Let’s dig deeper into the rabbit hole together! (–> subscribe to my newsletter)
Now I’m curious. What is your favorite lever? How do you tackle tasks? Write in the comments below!
VI. Bottomline and final hint: what should you focus on?
So, what‘s more important, effectiveness or efficiency? You probably guessed right, when you thought about effectiveness… Doing the right things is always more important than doing things right.
Doing the right things beforehand saves “tons” of time and can make following work steps or processes completely obsolete. It automatically gives you the right direction.
Your ability to be the fastest in certain tools, software, etc (doing things right) should only be used when you do the right things beforehand. Otherwise, they are completely worthless. Doing the wrong things efficiently means nothing – then you don’t even really reach the goal.
First, know the “what”, “what’s right” to reach an objective, only then think about the “How”. Right things first and then you do these things right.
If you work according to instructions and you don’t have to think or understand everything as you are not responsible, efficiency often helps a lot at first, though. Sooner or later, however, it will be more important to think for yourself and then find ways to avoid unnecessary work in order to solve the important things only.
Efficiency can get you ahead of your peers (horizontally the best), but effectiveness gets you up in the promotion ladder (vertically) AND sets you up from your peers as well. Often, effectiveness is learned by experience, but follow the progress of gainmoretime.com and I promise you will always be a step ahead!
Think also outside of your daily job: what would be the “right” things in your life? What are your goals? Imagine you want to live more healthy, you want to improve your financial wealth, your relationships, your education or your spiritual life.
Part of the “right things” in many of these cases are good habits, done consistently. To implement habits you need to gain time for them and plan them. If you’re interested in more about successfully implementing Habits and Goal Setting Strategies in your life, subscribe to my newsletter for upcoming blog articles.
Think about this: doing the right things (effectiveness) in the right way (fast and correct) consistently over time leads to excellence in what you do. And then… financial freedom and freedom of time is not far away. You get paid for these years of experience and build a much larger piece of cake from it.
Action items
These are tiny little ideas for you to try and test them for the upcoming week!
- Next time, you have a task: think about the result. What is really necessary for the result? Evaluate the risk of shortening the ways! Maybe it’s only a simple formula that is sufficient compared to a complicated one and that the risk is low that the simple formula doesn’t consider further enhancements of the analysis…
- Next time somebody gives you a task, pay attention to their feedback when they first see your first draft or the result. If they don’t, ask for it. Write down: the person’s name and what they pay attention to.
- Ask your boss specific questions to narrow the scope and work package upfront, so you feel comfortable to deliver the output within a reasonable time! Act more responsible for that task, make it your “own”.
- Which MS Office or Apple tools do you work most with? Find out how your colleagues shorten their work with those tools, e.g. shortcuts in MS Excel.
What are your experiences? What’s your favorite effectiveness lever? Write a comment below!
By the way, I just wrote an article about Top Productivity Hacks for Desktop Jobs, enjoy reading and applying them at work and let me know, what’s your favorite one 😉