This seems to imply that you would only give your best work if it was noticed by the company and/or management. I’m talking about self-worth, where you do a good job to satisfy yourself, even if your fellow employees are not doing a good job.
Well, re-read the paragraph about the Tier 1/Tier 2 support. I was doing my best work to satisfy myself and found that I then got handed the work of another team. Not because I was good, but because they were too spineless to solve the problem. I don’t take pride in being taken advantage of, thanks.
This is definitely true for fast climbs. When it comes to advancing ideas or your overall career, the peeps in charge will just naturally cotton to the people they know. And folks tend to leave the hierarchy behind when they enter places like bars or the smoking area. A clique forms and before you know it, being the guy who sits at the desk and never takes a break becomes the one management doesn’t feel they know well enough to trust. Been there. HOWEVER, as someone who skews heavily toward the “what you know” category, acumen has paid off in spades in the long game. When our office closed it didn’t matter who you knew–your job was just as gone as mine. Outside the office I was known as “…they guy who did X, Y, Z. Lots of fun to talk to on the phone, but nobody knows what he looks like.” Job search was easy, it was just a matter of linking my unextraordinary mug to the resume’ & reputation; and I had cred with my former coworkers when it came time to recruit them into the new organization.
As for the OP: I am a moody bitch. Sprint, chill, sprint, chill, sprint–win by a nose. If I think the employer is making a reasonable effort to give me the tools to meet their goals, I am inspired to crush it and drag people up with me. But if “the beatings will continue until morale improves” then I can be a total dog until they get their shit together. But to be fair, I do have a conscience and don’t dally for long. Typically when things are slow or broken I start doing my own thing, rethinking what the company is doing, and just move in that direction on my own. Eventually they catch up and either smack me down or adopt what I’ve been doing.
Did that additional work cause you to stay later than everyone else without getting more pay?
Well, then the question doesn’t really apply to you, does it?
Half-assing stuff is not a behavior I want to impart to my children. To answer your question, yes, I open the door to the best of my ability. I don’t open it just enough to squeeze through. I open it fully, enter or exit, check to see if anyone is coming through after me and hold it for them. If not, I let it close on its own. Unless it sticks open for some reason, at which point I use my awesome door-closing skills to make sure it is closed.
As others have said, you seem to be trying to conflate two areas that simply aren’t linked. The only part of my self-worth related to my job is honoring the agreement we have - that I do the job to certain standards for a pre-determined amount. I wouldn’t feel better about myself because I did more than my co-workers, or bad because some are better.
Besides, the employer can arbitrarily change the standards for what’s a good job. Would I suddenly be a crappy person because they raised the quota to something I couldn’t achieve? A gripe I had with a former employer is that they “coached” the bottom 5% of performers, even if they had met the employer’s quotas, as part of creating a “high performance culture.”
You’ve really NEVER had a job where you could earn more by doing better work?
Had a call from my youngest the other day. She is a project manager at a tech firm - doing quite well in terms of assignments, pay, promotions. She said she feels like she is stealing her pay, because she isn’t DOING anything - just making sure other people do their jobs. I asked what kind of hours she is putting in. She said basically 9-4:30, w/ min computer work over weekends around deadlines and such. But she said she is by far the best PM their firm has, and her boss’ clear favorite.
So - what more is she supposed to do, just because her innate skills/abilities/personality make a job seem easy for her, that others struggle at?
Consistent with my prior comment that I would produce the average +1, I always try to be in the top half - more likely the top quarter - just to avoid being an easy target.
All of my post school fulltime work has been as a lawyer, with most as a long-time (30+ yrs) gov’t employee. Admittedly, my experience is restricted.
In a private firm, there was the HOPE that if you put in more and more hours, that eventually you MIGHT make partner. But in reality, associates were tools for the partners’ benefit. A big shake-out in the profession around that time in which entire hiring classes fired served as proof. I decided relatively quickly that I did not care for the lifestyle - or the work - sufficiently to see if I could make partner.
I can easily imagine a sole practitioner or partner in a very small firm might see the direct effect of increased effort on earnings. But I’ve never been the entrepreneurial type.
In the gov’t, pay is pretty set, and bonuses are miniscule. The ability to play politics and dumb luck has generally (always?) impressed me as far more important in upward mobility than the quality/quantity of work. I’ve never been a good politician - just a damned efficient and productive worker.
My experience in govt work is a little different than Dinsdale’s. Being known as the hardest worker on the team usually does not result in monetary rewards, but it can mean you have some leverage when it comes to work assignments. Like, if you have a reputation for being a half-asser, you will likely be stuck with the tedious tasks that any zombie could do rather than the high profile tasks that are more emotionally rewarding and impressive on a resume.
But ultimately, it comes down to how effective you are at what you do, not how hard you work. I have a couple of coworkers who work very hard, but the work they turn out isn’t all that great for all the time they spend on it. The guy who spends two weeks crunching numbers with a calculator when everyone else uses a pivot table in Excel isn’t going to get any extra props. He may feel like he is doing a better job than the lazy slobs with all their new-fangled tools, but at the end of the day people only care about the results. They don’t care that you worked harder than everyone else. They don’t care that you loved the assignment more than everyone else. They just care about the result.
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So, I’m being paid $X to pack 16 and my coworkers are being paid $X to pack 15. Seems to me that the market rate for pallets is $X for 15, not $X for 16.
If I was a business, I’d be looking to renegotiate my contract, and only have to provide 15 for my price, just like all my competitors. Because I’m not a business, I’m told to provide 16 because:
a concept that doesn’t apply to businesses. Businesses don’t enter into agreements to augment their internal feelings of self worth. They don’t over-deliver in order to make themselves feel better, they don’t pay workers more because they have the ability to, they pay more or deliver more if the market requires them to.
If you’re asking would I provide 15 or 16, I’d probably go for 16 because providing good value to your business partner is good business, and can benefit me when business isn’t so good. But I’m not doing it out of the goodness of my heart, or to fulfill an internal need, it’s just business.
But there’s limits, right? I mean, some of this is pride–and I get that. I always want to be excellent at work. I get a lot of satisfaction out of it–and sometimes I fail to meet my responsibilities to my son and my family because I put being the best I can be at work doing what I love.
I work with a guy who basically barely meets expectations. His attitude is very much “My son gets my time. I’m not going to cut into parenting time, period–work gets my 40 hours and if I can’t get it done in that, I don’t do it.” And he is a great dad. Is his attitude less ethical than mine?
Actually being friends with higher-ups is usually a much better source of job security than doing a job well; the owner’s favorite will get retained even if Joe the Competent doesn’t. And if you’re trying to hit ‘performance requirements,’ very often those are based on metrics that have nothing to do with how much effort you put in, but with how well you do at gaming the system. Tech support jobs are notorious for this, where very often the people who have the best performance metrics are those who game the system - the person who closes customer calls at the least excuse and lets someone else deal with it when they call back gets good numbers, while the person who actually tries to solve problems has excessive call times and bad ticket closure rates.
I work to get paid because I need money to do the stuff that I’m actually interested in. My sense self-worth has nothing to do with my job, the job is just a requirement to live in society as we know it. I like doing a decent job at things, but I’m not going to knock myself out trying to do the best I possibly could - I’d rather have my energy for me, and not work unpaid overtime or stress over the job in my off-time. This is a bit of exaggeration for me since I like my current job, but if I was working some kind of restaurant, retail, or factory job it would be 100% true.
How many people would really keep doing the exact same job for the exact same employer if they won the lottery and didn’t need the money? Especially people working as wait staff in restaurants or moving pallets in warehouses?
I’ve had depressing jobs (I did exactly what was expected of me) and exciting jobs (I put extra effort, but enjoyed doing so.)
If I was loading 16 pallets / hour and everyone else was doing 15, I might approach management if I had discovered a more efficient way to load. (I would hope to get some reward for enabling that firm to do better.)
I had one part-time job where my co-workers told me to slow down, because I was ‘making them look bad’. (I soon found another job.)
I remember early in my career when another hard worker was bitching about the slackers. I told him they were my favorite cow-orkers, because they made me look good if I simply did the minimum!
I acknowledge there are all kinds of gov’t work. And I’m not advocating being a “half asser”. But in my jobs, management got to decide what was or was not challenging work, they got to decide who to assign it to, and they got to decide whether they considered the work product exceptional or not. So the “quality” component all depends on being in mgmt.'s good favor. Meanwhile, the boring grunt work (which is the vast majority) needs to get done, so if you show you are good at doing that, they’ll happily give you more and more. JME, of course.
This is the primary reason why people should be paid based upon their individual contributions and productivity.
This is a hard concept to implement within companies, because it requires either objective measurement criteria that employees can be measured by or critical 360 evaluations that avoids favoritism etc.
If you know that the bar is low and that you aren’t going to get paid more even if you do more, there isn’t much incentive to outperform.
But if you had trust that you would get paid more for higher productivity, most people would gladly take that on.
Good post. I also do not see work as a moral imperative of any kind, requiring sacrifice on my part so my employer can have more for less. Fuck that.
Sadly, he chose not to relocate his business when I moved away. 
Why would you tie your self-worth to what you are worth to other people who seek to exploit you?
Me, I’m just opening a door.
I think you have excellent priorities.