Hard work and good work. Two things that should be rewarded and are. But sometimes I believe we place more reward on hard work then on good work. I think this is backwards, and it hurts companies more than they know.

It goes something like this. Stay late, get rewarded. Deliver a day ahead of a deadline, get rewarded. Create a great design in half a day and cut out early? Well, the boss wants to know, what else could you have done with that extra 30 minutes?

It doesn’t always happen like this, and, in the long run, good work is what is rewarded, by the market. But for the day-to-day it’s the martyrs that tend to get the kudos. Regardless of whether that extra work is of any real benefit to the company at all.

Why is this? I think it’s two fold.  One, good work is much harder to do than hard work. Hard work, ironically, is the easiest pursuit in business. It’s easy to put your head down and grind out a ten hour workday. Much easier, than say, creating a product that resonates with your audience. Two, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate good work as it is happening; to the point where it’s easier to revert back to the tried and true, and ask “how hard are they working?”

In this TED talk Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (affiliate link) describes a fascinating study call the “Candle Problem” wherein a group of people motivated by financial rewards based on performance (speed in this case) perform worse at solving the problem than those without any incentive to solve it as fast as possible.

And I believe that this thinking, that rewards for metrics like speed and volume over quality, is what ruins many work places and diminishes the value of the employees that work there.  For example, it’s been said that Apple’s upcoming tablet computer has been in prototype for at least 6 or 7 years.   Never quite ready for the big time in the world of high Apple standards.  Is there any question that it will crush the slew of PC-based tablets just released at CES last week in order to get “ahead” of the Apple launch?  There shouldn’t be.  Apple will own the dominant tablet device.

Now, do you think that the product managers and designers on the tablet are more worried about making the tablet their life’s work, or shipping something quickly?  The answer is obvious.  Apple values good over hard or fast or any other attribute.  More and more the successful companies are the ones that value good thought and products over hard work and speed.

It’s not that hard work and speed to market aren’t important.  Of course they are.  But on a continuum of business priority in what order do they fall and in what way are they rewarded?  Is good thought rewarded above hard work? Is it even rewarded in the same way that hard work is?  Highly doubtful. Highly foolish.

So back to you.  When is the last time you evaluated how you reward your people? If successful companies are more successful at rewarding good thought over hard work, it seems imperative that your people are rewarded the same way.