While many executives and thought leaders are engaging in a rich discussion about the future of work, few are asking the most basic question: What should work actually be? The answer to this question is not a matter of changing workplace policies and replacing people with bots, but rather it should be focusing on the unseen, value-creating parts of work that are currently being overlooked. This includes imagining solutions that don’t yet exist for problems that haven’t emerged, seeking out fresh opportunities, and managing the peaks and dips of employee energy.
Historically, work was defined as the amount of energy required to lift an object over some distance. This was a very crude estimate, however, as it didn’t take into account the fact that not all forces act directly on an object or that the distance of displacement could be measured in two dimensions instead of one. It also didn’t factor in the fact that not all forces act at a right angle to the motion of an object, so some of the force might be sort of “wasted” in terms of what it contributes to the motion.
In physics, the concept of work is more refined. In physics, work is the product of force times displacement, with both the magnitude of the force and the direction of the displacement being important factors. This concept can be applied to any type of movement, including linear, angular, rotational, and vibrational. The SI unit for work is the joule, which is equal to 1 newton-meter, and is defined as one force unit times a displacement unit. For example, the amount of work it takes to move a 100-gram apple over 1 meter is equal to approximately 0.9 joules.
The joule is not the only unit used to describe work, but it is the most commonly used unit when dealing with physical and mechanical quantities. Work can also be expressed in a variety of non-SI units, such as kilogram-meters or foot-pounds. However, the fundamental definition of work is always the same: a force unit times a displacement unit.
In a free, rigid body with no fields or internal degrees of freedom, the work done by a force is equal to the change in the object’s kinetic energy, which is given by the formula W = (D E k ) / m