Want to Become The Most Valuable Person at Work? Here's How You Can.

Proof of value is a new way to measure productivity at work. It requires you to capture performance metrics for yourself to show how you contribute to the bottom line.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Lastmonth, Spotify’s CEO put to words what every executive in America has been thinking for months now:work around work has got to go.

What does this mean exactly?

Revenue isn’t the primary path to profitability, especially for B2C companies that rely on hefty investment in new user acquisition. Many companies like Spotify, Uber, and Airbnb are facilitating a service — they aren’t actually selling anything. Their value is in the platforms they’ve created. In exchange, they act more like digital toll collectors in the modern economy.

Companies like this provide value, but they may not actually have inherent value, much to the chagrin of shareholders and other corporate champions. Beyond the lines of code buttressing their platforms, these companies don’t own any assets or have any intellectual property to buoy their balance sheets.

Just look at Airbnb. What was originally intended to be used to rent out spare rooms in your home has become an unregulated cottage industry of pseudo-hotels and vacation homes. Between the high rates and absurd cleaning fees, more and more people are ditching the platform for traditional hotels.

This matters because almost every tech entrepreneur is now modeling their company off of the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world (or at the very least, their pitch decks). Unprofitable companies with little to no intrinsic value are proliferating, while Silicon Valley VCs take bets, hoping one or two miraculously succeed.

The tech industry has been massively disruptive in every facet of our lives. It’s now about to disrupt the way we work. Whatever tech leaders do, other businesses will be forced to follow. If tech leaders opt for efficiency as a path to profitability — rather than revenue generation — then that is how businesses are going to operate moving forward.

This shift is happening just asautomation and artificial intelligence is slowly beginning toeliminate jobs and displace white collar workers.In the near term,your ability to maintain a job isn’t going to depend on how hard youwork.It’ll be predicated on how efficient you are at getting your job done and the overall value you provide to your employer.

The question now is how do workers capture value, quantify it, and prove it to their employer.

This essay is going to attempt to answer that question. It’ll give you an easy, step-by-step playbook for how you can capture value and begin leveraging it to ensure you stay gainfully employed as the digital transformation gets underway.

Throw away your resume. It’s worthless. You need to focus on proving your value instead.

Under the current work paradigm, positions are doled out based on experience. You don’t have to be a good achiever in practice, you just need to be good at marketing yourself as one.

This is an incredibly inefficient way to leverage human capital and employers know it. That’s why they’ve slowly started phasing out requirements for college degrees and started phasing in alternative human talent evaluation strategies. They want to know you can do the job and do it well before you even set foot on campus for your first day of work.

Look at the process for getting a job at a company like Google as an example. Google eliminated its educational requirements for hiring back in 2022. A passive observer might argue this was an effort to reduce barriers to entry for employment, appealing to diversity initiatives. While that might be a byproduct of the decision, it certainly wasn’t the goal.

Google, like other tech giants, takes several rounds to hire a candidate. Each round is designed to evaluate how well you fit into the existing corporate culture and whether or not you can successfully perform in the role you’re applying for. Instead of just evaluating your qualifications from your resume, companies like Google are now testing your value.

Here’s how one consulting firm describes the interview process for technical roles at Google:

For Technical roles, such as software engineering, if the first phone screening goes well, you should expect additional rounds. These are technical phone screening that involves phone coding challenges to test basic problem-solving and data structuring skills, such as DOM manipulation, or CSS. If your technical phone interview goes well you may be asked to complete a take home coding project.

Who needs a college degree when your future employer can test you instead?

Employers want to know that you can do the work before they invest time and money into bringing you on. This evaluation process isn’t necessarily new but it will likely be expanded to existing talent pools within companies. As executives look to trim fat, they’ll be taking inventory of their current talent pool, finding ways to determine who is worth keeping on and who should be let go.

The game of being gainfully employed is changing. As a worker, you need to stop polishing your resume. It’s worthless. Instead, you need to think like your employer. You need to look at the unique value proposition you bring to your company.

Employment is a business proposition. You are selling your labor and talent in a market economy where other workers are doing just the same. To understand how you fit in the market, you need to capture and quantify how your time and talent can become an asset to a company rather than a liability.

The following is one process you can use to do just that.

Step 1: Understand how your job description aligns with the work you’re supposed to be doing.

Your job description is arguably one of the most important documents governing your employment that you’ve never studied in detail, much less paid any attention to. It outlines the role you were hired to fill, the expectations of your job, and hopefully, how your supervisor measures success.

This simple document is an informal contract between you and your employer. It outlines what you’re supposed to be doing and creates a justification for compensating you.

The problem is job descriptions are usually poorly written. As someone who’s written a handful, I can personally tell you the easiest way to create a job description is to copy and paste someone else’s.

Many job descriptions are recycled prose that have no relation to your actual job. Chances are your boss didn’t write it, which means they actually have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing in your current role.

You can use this to your advantage.

Take your job description and study it intensely. Break it down into work projects and tasks. What are you actually working on right now? What does your job description say you’re supposed to be working on? Is it in alignment with what your current work expectations? If not, where are the gaps? Pay attention to these details and take notes. You’ll need to refer back to them later on.

If you discover you only do 30% of the work that’s written in your job description, that might be a good indicator that you’re being underutilized. If you’re underutilized, you’ll be first on the chopping block during the next round of layoffs.

On the other hand, you might discover you’re doing more than what’s being expected of you. This can open the door for you to negotiate higher compensation during your next annual review.

Take this information to create a work breakdown structure for yourself. Consider this your roadmap that will shape how you prove your value moving forward.

Step #2: Set up projects and tasks in time-tracking software.

The key to showing value to your employer is to start thinking like your employer. Stop being a butt in a chair and start being a manager. Understand how your time is being allocated and identify ways you can improve that allocation.

To be able to do that, you need to start tracking your time. Personally, I use Clockify, but you can use whatever tool tickles your fancy.

Set up your time-tracking software to align with the current projects you’re working on and the tasks associated with them. For example, as a Medium writer, I track all of the time I spend on Medium in Clockify. I track articles I write, I track content planning, and I track responding to comments.

Do this for everything you do, including administrative work like checking your email. I call this overhead, but you can call it whatever you want.

Now, once you understand your workload, you can begin assigning value to it. This is why I love using Clockify. You can designate work as billable or non-billable and add a billable rate to all of your work. The rate you use can be real — based on actual income or your salary — or it can be aspirational. Just use a number so you can begin to see the actual value of your time as you’re executing tasks.

For example, writing this article is considered billable work because it generates revenue for me. Medium doesn’t pay hourly, but because I track my hours and I know how much I earn from Medium, I can calculate my hourly rate. That gives me an average hourly rate I can then use in Clockify.

As of this moment, my hourly wage for all of the pieces I wrote in 2023 is $16.51. This makes it possible for me to quantify the value of writing on Medium.

Likewise, non-billable work allows you to see how much time you’re wasting on activities that don’t contribute to your bottom line. For example, if you spend 10 hours every week managing your inbox, that’s 10 hours you’re not allocating toward tasks or projects that could generate revenue for you personally or your employer.

You can’t make decisions on how to improve your time utilization until you put a system like this into place. You need to see how you currently use your time in order to determine whether or not you’re using it wisely. To do that, you need to begin tracking your time for everything you do.

Step #3: Clock in and out of tasks to collect data on how you use your time.

I clock in and out of everything I do. In fact, I’m clocked in writing this article as we speak:

One of the main benefits of doing this is that once I’m clocked in I’m focused on the work at hand. I keep meticulous spreadsheets of everything I do so I’m incentivized to stay focused so I don’t mess up my numbers.

This is important for me because I work for myself. When a prospective client needs to know my rate, I use the data I keep in Clockify to provide it to them. (And when a prospective client offers me work that’s waaaaay below what I’m worth, I use this data to justify saying no — or at the very least counter).

If you’re a 9to5er, clocking into your job can help you see how much time you’re actually spending working versus dilly dallying on unimportant work. Of the time you’re working, you’ll have greater clarity on how much time you spend on actual work activities versus low-value work like going to meetings or managing your inbox.

Only once you begin collecting this data can you start taking action on it. What I like about Clockify is that it has a calendar feature so I can see where gaps exist during the day and how I can plan my productivity around them:

It integrates with my Google Calendar so I can see when scheduled meetings run over or which blocks of time are my most productive (answer: mornings).

Data is the most important commodity of the 21st century. Big megacorporations aren’t the only ones who have the ability to collect it. You can harness your own data too.

Start collecting data on how you use your time. Begin clocking in and out of tasks to see what you’re working on and whether or not it’s adding the value it’s intended to add.

Step 4: Pull periodic reports of your time to review how it’s being utilized.

Once you have a few weeks’ worth of data at your disposal, you can pull a report of how you’re using your time. If you’ve set up your system correctly, you can break it down by project (or client), distinguish between billable and non-billable work, and quantify the amount of time you’re actually allocating to low-value work like email management.

Here’s an example of one of my work weeks:

A report like this breaks down your time utilization according to specific projects and tasks. And if you set it up correctly (I did not here), it’ll tell you how much money each task is worth.

Over time, you’ll begin to notice patterns. If you’re in a performance-based job, like sales, you’ll be able to see the return on your time. If you’re spending too much time on non-revenue-generating work, you can look for ways to eliminate, delegate, or automate work that isn’t serving you.

For me, I calculate this by evaluating my freelance writing projects. I know down to the penny what my time is worth. To increase the value of my time, I delegate certain tasks to my virtual assistant. This then frees up more of my time so I can write articles like this for you fine folks here on Medium.

Time is money. You keep track of your finances, why not do the same thing with your time? The only way you can understand what you’re worth — to yourself and your employer — is to begin tracking your time.

Step 5: Strategically reallocate your time to higher-value work.

Now that you have a full work breakdown structure of your job, a system to track your time, and some data showing how you’re actually using your time, you can start managing it.

Look at where you’re spending your time and start getting rid of “work around work.” If you notice meetings running long, for example, start asking why. Maybe these meetings don’t have an agenda to structure them, making it too easy for you and your coworkers to go off tangent. Create an agenda for these meetings to help them stay on track.

Maybe you’re spending too much time managing your inbox. Reduce that time by setting up inbox rules. For example, I have a rule in my inbox for unsubscribing to emails. Any email that has the word ‘unsubscribe’ in it is triaged into a folder titled “Recommend Unsubscribing.” I spend a few minutes every day monitoring this inbox while tasking my virtual assistant to do the actual work of unsubscribing me from marketing emails I don’t actually need or want.

Remember your job description? Pull it back out. Is there anything that you’re not currently working on that your employer thinks you should be working on? Now’s the time to start adding new tasks and responsibilities to your plate.

If you need to, schedule a meeting with your boss to go over your job description. Rewrite it if you have to. Ask for clarification on tasks that you’re not doing. Open the conversation up for your boss to identify what higher value work looks like and position yourself to be the person who takes on that work.

Step 6: Start doing higher-value work ASAP.

One of the biggest questions that will likely come up during this exercise is actually identifying what high-value work looks like. Let me give you an example of what that looks like from my perspective.

I recently pitched a publication that offered to compensate me $75 for an article. On average, it takes me about three hours to write an article.

Compare that to writing here on Medium. My best performing article has generated $743 in revenue to date. That article also took me about three hours to write.

What’s a better use of my time? Pitching an article to an editor who’s going to pay me $75 or writing the article, publishing it here on Medium, and giving myself the chance of letting it earn $743?

This is what it means to allocate your time toward higher-value work. And that’s why quantifying time and value is important. You can’t reallocate your time if you don’t know the value of it.

Only once you know what your time is worth can you begin letting go of low-value work and start prioritizing high-value work that actually matters in the long run.

Final takeaway.

Proof of value is going to be the primary driver in human capital allocation moving forward. Employers don’t know the value you provide — only the amount of money you’re costing them in compensation and benefits. It’s up to you to quantify your own value and demonstrate it for them.

This is why you need to start thinking about your employment as a business proposition. Human capital is typically recorded as a liability on a company’s balance sheet. Your job is seen as an expense. C-Suite executives that are on a mission to generate a profit for shareholders can do so by either generating more revenue or cutting costs. If they run a business that can’t increase revenue easily, they’ll look to cut costs instead, starting with eliminating human capital that isn’t providing a return on investment.

Your goal is to become an asset to your employer. Demonstrate that for every dollar they compensate you with, you’ll provide them $x in return. It doesn’t matter whether you quantify x by generating new revenue or saving money. Show your employer that you have value to offer and give them a dollar value to understand what your value actually is — not what you think it is.

This is where the future of work is heading. Workers now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become free agents in the labor market. Meanwhile, employers now have the option to source talent from a global talent pool. For better or for worse, that talent pool works harder for a far lower rate.

You need to stay competitive in the labor market. If your employer doesn’t see your value, another will. But the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it.

Don’t continue polishing your resume or passively waiting around for your boss to take care of you. Seize the initiative over your own employment. Quantify your value with irrefutable proof of what you bring to the table.

Start collecting the data, analyze it, and take action. This process alone is worth its weight in gold.