 Work smarter before working harder is common sense. Too many people are working really hard on tasks, activities and projects that don't produce much value in the eyes of their boss and therefore they don't get ahead at work very quickly. For example these people get caught up doing a lot of the urgent but not important tasks. How do I work smarter is a question we should often ask ourselves. I have five essential approaches to increase the value your efforts create and these are firstly target the bigger picture, secondly maximise automation, third work to leverage your team's efforts, fourth focus on results rather than activity and then fifth aimed to deliver eight commercial benefits. And before I dive into these five approaches I'm going to quickly cover firstly what does working smarter mean, secondly is working smarter possible in my role and third why working smarter before working harder is needed. Any professional and manager of teams has lots of opportunities to work smarter before working harder. To get ahead at work delivering as much value as possible to the business is a must. Use these five approaches to identify the most valuable areas of your job and put more efforts into these areas. My name is Jess Colbs and if you're new here in Hans Dot Training shares people management expertise, resources and courses teaching the skills to step change your team's performance. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as a video timestamps so do take a look at these and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. For those of you that are not sure what does working smart mean let me cover that. Working smart is simply creating more value for the business in the same time worked or effort taken. For example you improve how you produce a set of reports and produce five reports in the same time as it used to take to produce three reports. Another example reducing the cost of producing a widget without any other factors changing. A final example you're converting a set number of inquiries into a higher level of sales. These all increase the value produced without spending more or taking more time and are examples of working smarter. Working harder would be to work longer to produce the five reports or sell the widget at a lower price and lower profit to keep market share or to spend more on advertising to get enough leads to win the same level of sales. If businesses don't constantly look to make improvements to how they serve their customers or the cost of serving their customers their competitors will overtake them. Don't improve for long enough and there won't be a business left. Help your business be successful by looking for improvements in everything you do. Another question asked is working smarter possible in my role? This is a good question. Any job that involves regular problem-solving the answer is easy yes. Most professional roles and all management roles fall into this category. For those that do more routine repetitive tasks as part of their job then working smarter might be harder to achieve yet there will still be opportunities. Every job should have opportunities to save time. Saving time by changing how you do a task is an improvement and therefore working smarter. Look for the opportunities in your role and act when you find them. Why working smarter before working harder is needed. To be successful at work to be given more interesting tasks more responsibility more autonomy to be regularly promoted or progress your career you can't avoid working hard. I have not met any successful person that has not worked hard. Working smarter not harder is the dream. Working smarter and work harder is the reality of being successful. I have met a lot of people that worked very hard but progressed their careers slowly. Working hard is not enough on its own to gain success and promotion at work. Working smarter before working harder is about finding what is valuable to work on and then do more of what's valuable to work on to the company rather than just working harder on everything. Let's cover how do I work smarter? I have five key approaches to identify the most valuable areas in your job. Use these and focus more of your efforts in the high value areas. When you have urgent requests and problems coming in from all directions it can be hard to focus on the most important valuable work. Do your best to carve out time to work on the most important areas rather than the most urgent. So the first way to work smarter is to target a bigger picture. One of the better ways to work on what is really valuable to the business is to understand the current business goals and how these fit into the longer term strategy. Understand how your business unit, function, team and finally your personal role can help reach those business goals. Full more goals are usually what the company thinks are the highest value activities. The more you can focus your energy time and work on helping achieve those full more goals the more likely you'll be doing high value work. Work with your boss to create more time and energy working on the higher value areas of your role aligned within the bigger picture. Help yourself and the team create the most value for the business as possible. The second way to work smarter is to maximize automation. Your automation can be very small. It could be like using links within a spreadsheet for example or using systems to send out information automatically all the way through to using systems or robotics to replace parts of or full roles done by people. Wherever you can use automation to firstly increase accuracy or secondly increase the speed of doing a task or to reduce the cost of doing a task. Take it. Each of these outcomes adds additional value to the company. Your automation works very well in stable environments or replacing repetitive tasks that don't change very quickly. Automation doesn't work as well in fast changing environments or where tasks keep changing. Always look out for opportunities to use automation. Do check the business benefits before investing in automation. The third way to work smarter is to leverage your team's efforts. Your managers are in a brilliant place to work smartly. Managers are solving problems all day long. It is a key part of the job. In examples of working smarter before working harder are firstly spotting problems that when removed will help the whole team save time and effort. Or secondly challenging the status quo to remove redundant tasks, outdated tasks or low value tasks, freeing up more time for the team to spend on the higher value tasks. Third, saying no to you or the team doing lower value tasks than are currently being worked on. Fourth, getting agreement from your boss or the leadership team to focus more of your team's time on the higher value tasks. The more you can do as a manager to leverage the time and efforts of your team so they can create more value for the business, the better off you, your team and the business will be. The fourth way to work smarter is to focus on results rather than activity. Your undertaking activity is only really valuable if it creates desired results for the team in the business. When you're focused on goals and results, research shows you are at least 20% more likely to achieve the results. To get a team focusing on results, I would suggest that firstly, you create specific goals for the results you want, ideally with your team. Secondly, explain why they are important and how they fit into the wider goals of the business. And third, measure and share the progress against these goals, i.e. create visibility of progress. And fourth, keep your focus publicly and obviously on the goals agreed. And your team will have constant reminders that the goals are important to you and thus important to them. Goals and results provide much clearer direction and the ability to measure progress. Use goals and results to focus the team on the higher value areas. The fifth way to work smarter is to aim to deliver eight commercial benefits. All the work you focus on and you get your team to focus on should be creating one of these outcomes or benefits for the company. Firstly, increase revenue. Secondly, save costs. Thirdly, saved time. Fourth, improve processes. Fifth, increased efficiency. Sixth, reduce risk. Seventh, achieving business targets and eighth, pleasing customers. These benefits are what all businesses need and the more work you can do to achieve these benefits, the more value you will create. Prioritize the opportunity to create the biggest impact to one or more of these benefits and complete this first. Only then move on to the next opportunity on your prioritized list. And I found one of the best ways of finding great opportunities is asking a lot of questions and listening to what team members tell me. The best opportunities are rarely obvious. If they were that have already been taken. Keep in mind these eight commercial benefits and keep asking yourself how does what you're working on achieve one or more of these. So in summary, work smarter before working harder to get ahead at work is a must. From my experience, you have to work hard to have a successful career, whatever your current role and ambitions are. Working hard alone is not enough either. In my view, working smart and working hard is the starting point of a longer term success in a career. The five critical approaches to consistently work smarter are firstly, target the bigger picture. Secondly, maximize automation. Third, work to leverage your team's efforts for focus on results rather than activity. And fifth, aim to deliver eight commercial benefits. Ask your team to look out for any opportunities to work smarter. Keep yourself and your team focused on the higher value tasks, activities and projects rather than the urgent ones. If you have any questions on working smarter before working harder to get ahead at work, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.