Breaking the worthless rules to turn your job easy

Bangalore: Many people are earning a living at jobs that they do not enjoy. Most of them feel screwed, and feel helpless to change it. If they learn how to break the worthless rules at work, they will get more stuff done in less time, which makes them happier and more productive, Rosin Ingle from Irishtimes.com.



'Hacking' work, which is the act of getting what you need to do your best by exploiting loopholes and creating workarounds. It is taking the usual ways of doing things and bypassing them to produce improved results, for the company as well as for the employee.

According to a new book, Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results, "hacking job is all part of a growing work-related DIY (Do it yourself) movement. The term "hacking" might conjure up images of the teenage cyber criminals, but this is about ordinary people finding often low-tech solutions to everyday work problems, by bending or breaking company rules.

The authors, Josh Klein and Bill Jensen are encouraging employees to look around the workplace, identify a better way of doing things and implement change, tossing long-standing company edicts and silly office procedure out of the window along the way. They claim that the book, named one of Harvard Business Review's 10 breakthrough ideas for this year.

The book gives an example of two employees in an insurance company whose salary grade didn't entitle them to locks on their doors. Two hours of their working day were wasted because they had to file away confidential documents every evening and morning. Acting against official company policy, their manager decided to put locks on the doors, saving the company 10 man-hours a week.

Mostly it's common sense. Earlier this week Klein went to give a talk at the Facebook office in Dublin, where a female employee told him that one of the tools she used was too slow for the job she needed it to do.

Listening to employees is a strategy that has been employed by some of the world's top companies such as Google, whose "20 percent rule" allows engineers to spend one day a week on pet projects that are not necessarily in their job description. This was how Gmail came about.

The enemies of the work hacker are worthless rules, a lack of common sense and the because-I- say-so mentality. "Start with the rules or processes which are the biggest drain on your productivity - work from there," explained Klein.

A certain amount of audacity is required, and work hacking is not for everyone. "Traditionally, large companies have operated from a position where everybody is just expected to do what they are told. So employees take for granted that they have to just suffer through these processes when in fact there is always a way to work around them," Klein said. "A bad boss will take a good idea from an employer and tell them no, because they didn't come up with it. In that case, we recommend hacking the system. Eventually the boss is going to be replaced. It's a question of whether they take the company and your job down with it," added Klein.