The word “work” can conjure up a lot of different images and ideas. It might be a horse pulling a plow through the field, a student lifting a book over her head, a crane holding a girder in place as it is being welded, or an Olympian throwing a shot-put. Regardless of the image, it is important to remember that work is a quantity that can be measured. There are three key ingredients in work: force, displacement and the direction that the force causes the displacement. When these three quantities are known, the amount of work done is known.
In its simplest form, work is the product of the force that caused the motion and the distance that the movement covered. It is also a vector product, and as such it can take on values from 0 (zero) to 180o (180 times the direction of the force). The SI unit for work is the joule.
There are many ways to do work, and machines can make work easier or harder. An example of an easy way to do work is to use a dolly to move boxes across the room. It would require a large amount of force to push the boxes across the room by hand. However, a dolly can make it much easier to move the boxes by using a smaller amount of force. However, the box would still have to travel the same distance. Thus, the same amount of work is still accomplished.
More complicated examples of work can be found in science. For example, the centripetal force that a string exerts on a ball in uniform circular motion does no work. This is because the force is perpendicular to the velocity.
The future of work will require that organizations cultivate and draw on intrinsic human capabilities to undertake work for fundamentally different purposes than those that are currently in existence. Increasingly, frontline workers will be required to identify and solve problems and search for opportunities that are unseen. These tasks should be a substantial portion of their workload, not simply an occasional deviation from routine execution.
This will require companies to examine and redefine management systems, work environments, operations, leadership and management capabilities, performance management and compensation systems, and other human capital practices. It will also require a radical change in thinking about where work is done, when it is done, who does the work, and why it is done. Redefining work isn’t about reskilling people to perform different types of routine work or moving some of them into positions that are less likely to be automated. It is about redefining work in ways that create new value for people, customers and society. This will require redefining work in a way that enables employees to pursue what matters to them. This will unleash a massive amount of untapped potential that has been stifled by traditional work processes and structures.
