Work must create value, not "more work"

In the corporate environment, it is common to observe that a large part of the activities carried out in an organization with traditional management simply results in more work. Consequently, people find themselves compelled to work even more intensely, generating a continuous cycle of increasing tasks. This phenomenon is often referred to in the organizational context as the "cycle of despair".

It works like this. People work with bad processes. This generates complexity and variability. Thus, performance is often poor, and the result, even worse. The pressure grows to work “harder", not "better". Fearing for their jobs, individuals step up the quantity of work (not the quality). This increases the complexity and variability of the bad processes, which, not infrequently, get worse. More controls are created... And the cycle starts over, becoming a “perpetual motion machine” that, in general, drives people to exhaustion, toward burnout. And it puts organizations on the path to collapse.

This is reported, for example, in a recent survey by the international consulting firm Gartner, which interviewed more than 500 Human Resources leaders in 40 countries and concluded that 59% of the managers surveyed report spending a significant amount of time on “work to do work”.

You have certainly witnessed or worked in the midst of this kind of phenomenon, which occurs both in the “physical world” and in the “digital world”: lengthy reports that hibernate in “unread e-mails”, wasting time and generating more work. Spreadsheets saturated with data that generate more spreadsheets. Presentations understood by few and put into practice by even fewer. Not to mention poorly planned meetings that, not infrequently, generate more meetings. And so on.

This feeds on a traditional corporate mindset that spreads the valuing not of quality but of quantity, personified in the figure of the “workaholic”. Whoever arrives earliest and leaves latest gets bragging rights. Those who work more than expected are praised. A culture that reinforces “working a lot” instead of “working well”, normalizing the idea of “work for work's sake”.

The lean way requires a different mindset and practice. In this view, work needs to aim at value for the customer. First, in people's minds. The important question is no longer “am I working hard enough?”, but “does my work generate value?”.

Just as essential is the systemic structure. Working to generate value must be the focus of a “horizontal” flow. This is different from work oriented to “vertical” flows, which, for a number of reasons, easily become disconnected from the fundamental processes for creating value and from the real needs of customers. Without the customer's perspective as the “tipping point of the scale”, processes and work are not established according to what really matters. Consequently, we can work a lot, but with no direct impact on the customer's perception of value.

With the urgency to deliver better results, “firefighting” comes into play: more time spent working on containing repeated problems, which, because they are not addressed at the source – since there is no time to devote to solving problems consistently, because there is too much work to do –, keep processes incapable and consolidate a scenario of permanent complexity.

The antidotes to this “perpetual motion machine”, both in the individual mindset and in the systemic structure, must be at the core of management practices and leadership behavior. Going back to the essence of lean is fundamental: developing people who, by surfacing and solving problems, seek to create value for the customer in everything they do. This tends to slow down the undesirable cycle of “work for work's sake”. If an activity does not create value, in essence, it should not exist.

Lean concepts and practices need to be oriented toward steering the company in this direction. Daily Management (DM), for example, when properly planned and executed by prepared leaders, encourages work focused solely on creating value. People, when welcomed and engaged with due psychological safety, begin to ask much more naturally “why we are doing what we do”. And then the “perpetual motion machine” begins to jam.

Practicing lean means solving problems and developing people every day. Including the leadership itself. The mechanism for clarifying and resolving deviations is the virtuous cycle that enables the pursuit of excellence through constant orientation toward the purpose of delivering value. Assimilating in practice the logic of learning to see the real problems, associated with delivering value, makes it possible to trigger the problem-solving cycle that generates learning. This makes it possible to move away from the “firefighting” of containing “known deviations”, moving more and more toward consistent, purposeful work that solves “new” problems, seeking to prevent their recurrence.

Of course, this does not happen overnight. Companies with more traditional management cultures have difficulty clearly differentiating work that generates value from work that only multiplies more work. Sometimes they don't even know clearly enough what value is. They even experience confusion about who their customers and their processes are. In this context, a fundamental first step is learning to see what value is from the customer's perspective. And then to understand and structure all work in that direction.

However intuitively easy to understand the concepts of “value” and “customer” may seem, in practice it is a different story. Due to a lack of incentives or opportunities to discuss this from a more systemic perspective, the vision of purpose oriented toward delivering value to the customer gets lost or muddled. In this context, there is no shortage of “organizational noise” – vanities, power struggles, fads, etc. – to establish new and conflicting priorities, whose uselessness may be almost imperceptible.

That is why leaders need to make an effort to understand that working to generate more work is not just an explanation for poor performance, but also a decisive factor in people's quality of life – including that of the leaders themselves.

It is not hard to imagine the opportunities that arise when we break the cycle of "work for work's sake". Imagine a company where every task has a clear purpose, where teams work to solve real problems and where value for the customer is the guiding star of all decisions. This is not utopia — it is a possible future.

By focusing on what really matters and eliminating waste, it is possible to achieve more sustainable results, improve collaboration and promote a healthier work environment. It is not a quick fix, but a change in mindset that, once embraced, can transform organizational dynamics in a profound and lasting way.