Ability to Work

 

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The article ‘Effectiveness at Workplace’ in this blog touched upon three critical factors that determine the effectiveness of a person in performing any task at personal level or professional level. This article explores the ‘Ability to Work’ aspect in some more detail.

Ability to work is possession of necessary qualifications, skills and experience that are necessary for performing a task effectively and efficiently. The skills include both hard skills and soft skills. The educational qualifications are endorsement of hard skills that are job specific and often technical in nature. The soft skills on the other hand are inherent in an employee to some extent and further developed by training and constant practice. The soft skills are generic and are necessary to manage the work environment and for application of hard skills more effectively to perform a given task. The hard skills are easier to acquire and measure compared to soft skills.

Ability to work is not the opposite of disability because even people with disabilities have abilities to perform certain specific tasks. Also, It should not be confused with ‘Capability’ which denotes the full potential that exists in a person, some of which may be developed and some undeveloped or underdeveloped. The developed part of the capability forms the ‘Ability to Work’. Ability to work has three main components:

• Inherent Abilities - non-transferable natural abilities present in an individual such as physical strength, agility of a football player, flexibility of a gymnast or ballet dancer, voice of an opera singer, skills of a painter etc.
• Formally Acquired Abilities - knowledge and skills acquired by formal learning such as qualifications of a medical practitioner, engineer etc.
• Informally Acquired Abilities - knowledge and skills acquired by direct participation in the work or by focussed observation of the work being performed by competent persons or by self-learning.

Ability to work is a personal attribute that requires constant development. Even the natural abilities require nurturing and development to their full potential. If you listen to a professional violinist and an amateur, the main difference between the two is the number of hours they have practised with an aim to achieve excellence. In the organisational context we call this ‘experience’. In common parlance ‘experience’ is used to denote the number of years a person spends in an organisation or industry doing a job. However, spending time in performing a task or providing service without learning and improving is not experience. The natural abilities are generally non-transferable, while the acquired abilities are transferable.

The employer can facilitate the process of developing the abilities to work by providing training and creating a necessary environment but the results depend on each individual’s willingness and capacity to learn. Each individual has a certain capacity to learn and this capacity varies for different topics. One individual may have enormous capacity to learn mathematics while the other may be good at learning history and the third one music. For visualising the capacity to learn, take the example of two water storage tanks, one with 1000 litre capacity and the other with 500 litre capacity. If both are pumped with the same amount of water, the water filled is based on the capacity of each tank and the excess water just flows out and is wasted. Similarly just providing training without taking into consideration the capacity of a person to learn may not be effective. Very often valuable resources are wasted by providing general training to a whole department or section. It must be noted here that the comparison of the water storage tank provided here is just for a rough visualisation. The human brain’s capacity is unlike a rigid storage tank which doesn’t grow. The human brain grows and its capacity increases. Even in adults the constant usage tends to increase its usable capacity, although marginally. Its capacity is elastic, not rigid.

Some factors adversely influence the ability to work, even when necessary knowledge, skills and experience is present. The influence is temporary as long as the conditions last. Influence of alcohol, drugs, medications, injury, sickness, stress, cultural and religious beliefs, and legal restrictions are some of them. Age is another factor that affects the ability to work.

The notion of ability to work is contextual and dynamic that changes constantly with changes in responsibilities, ideas, concepts, market trends, policies, processes etc. It undergoes change as the organisation changes or the business environment changes. Take for example the abilities of a production manager in a conventional fuel based automobile industry. As the organisation grows and transforms itself into an electric vehicle manufacturer, the abilities required of a production manager also change.

Ability to work under pressure is another example of the contextuality of ability to work. When everything goes well one can find many people having the ability to work, but when the going gets tough, the number dwindles drastically. Having necessary academic qualifications and skills is one thing, but applying them effectively under pressure is quite different. Not everybody can do it. That is the reason the fire fighters, emergency responders and disaster management personnel frequently undergo mock drills to ensure that when actual call for duty comes, they perform without breaking down under pressure. Some people are made and condition themselves such that they perform excellently in a crisis situation. Normal work situations may not provide them the work thrill they look for. The notion of ability to work also changes for an individual with the passage of time. Injuries and sickness can affect the ability to work. The adaptability or the flexibility of an individual to quickly respond and adjust to the changes enhances the ability to work. A growth mindset is essential to ensure that the ability to work is always maintained and to prevent any downward slide. The growth mindset entails continuous learning and innovating. It involves honing of the existing skills and acquiring new skills. In industry it is common to hear about upskilling and reskilling, but often another component of skill development, i.e. deskilling, is often ignored. In certain tasks, unlearning must precede new learning. System implementation and upgrading is one such area. People who are involved in system implementations are aware of the dangers of duplicating the manual process in system automation, nonetheless this happens very often. If a manual process requires six approvals for payment, duplicating the same process in an ERP environment and having six computer based approvals is a highly inefficient way to work. Deskilling is essential in such tasks. Learning - conscious or unconscious, is ever present in individuals. Although interactions with others and exposure to an external environment are essential for learning, the human mind is such that even in total isolation it can build upon the knowledge acquired in the past and enhance the ability to perform a task. Structured learning accelerates the process and increases the effectiveness.. Every person who has recruited someone or written a resume for a job knows the importance of ability to work and demonstrating this ability to work to the employer. The ability to work defines the employability of a person at the time of recruitment. A major part of a recruitment process is finding a person with the right ability to work to match the competency requirements of a job vacancy. The other two factors i.e. Willingness to Work and the Environment, Process, Tools & Equipment to some extent are within the control of the employer. Professionally managed organisations usually maintain a competency framework that defines the competencies and the level of competencies necessary and for each job position within the organisation. These competencies are basically the abilities that are necessary for discharging the responsibilities of that position, which include the technical qualifications, skills and behavioural attributes demonstrated by soft skills. The recruiter takes this competency framework as a reference against which the competencies demonstrated by the candidate are compared and measured to select the best suited candidate. However, It must be understood that the recruitment process looks beyond current ability to work. Along with current abilities it is not uncommon for a recruiter to look at the potential of a candidate to perform the tasks as he/she grows along with the organisation. We will discuss the competency framework in a separate article later.