As organizations look for ways to create more value and engagement, they are shifting their focus from delivering more outputs to solving unseen problems and creating new opportunities. They want their employees to feel like they are owners of the work they do, rather than merely a small piece in a traditional pie. However, few are asking the most fundamental question: What is work?
Work is the amount of change in mechanical energy that a force causes an object to undergo. It is equal to force times displacement. The SI unit of work is the joule (J), or the amount of work required to move an object one meter by a given force. Non-SI units of work include the newton-meter, erg, foot-pound, and the kilowatt hour. Because work has the same physical dimension as heat, it is sometimes measured in units that are normally reserved for thermal or energy content, such as therm, BTU, and calorie.
The amount of work that a force does depends on several factors, including the direction of the displacement and whether or not it is reversible. For example, a person pushing a heavy briefcase against the ground does positive work because the displacement is forward. In contrast, someone holding a heavy briefcase that is falling down a hill does negative work because the displacement is backward.
An object’s total work is the sum of the amount of work done by each of its forces, multiplied by the ratio of its force to its mass. This is why the formula for work always uses F divided by m, or the formula for the energy of an object: E = m
Work can also be defined as the amount of work that a force does on an object per unit time, where m is its mass and t is its time. This definition is often referred to as the work-energy principle, and is an important part of the conservation of linear momentum and angular momentum.
When an object is free of fields and is a rigid body with no internal degrees of freedom, its total work is equal to its kinetic energy Ek, which changes with its linear velocity V and its angular velocity