It doesn't mean anything - the sentence doesn't make any sense. The phrase 'take something hardly' is meaningless. I suspect it is a bad translation by a non-native speaker. It sounds like a combination of "a man who worked hard" and "a man who took his work seriously". Note that the adverbs 'hard' and 'hardly' have completely different meanings. If you work hard, you put a lot of effort into your work; if you hardly work, you do almost no work.

The sentence doesn't make sense. He took his work 'seriously' would make sense.