Salary revisions are around the corner and everyone expects the best increase which is quite natural. In a buyers and sellers’ market, everyone sells themselves to an employer. The job that you hold is a business transaction like any other. Even if you are not in sales, you can never escape selling. It’s finally a transaction – you create value for the employer and employer in turn pays you a percentage of what he makes.
There is no other theory or practice that is sustainable. Like any trade, you are selling something that other people value more in return for something that you value more. This is exactly what you do at your day job.
Though we are not really trained to think this way, at your job you are selling the value you add to the organisation, for money and a place to work. People tend to think that they are selling their time just for money. But this is not the case.Contrary to popular belief, most businesses do not care about your time. All they care about is if the value you add is greater than the value they give to you in the form of a salary and an infrastructure or system in which you can productively use your skills.
If they are paying you more than the value you are adding, then you are gaining at their expense. This is a poor trade on their part. If you feel the value you add exceeds the benefits and money you receive in return, then that is a poor trade on your part.
What’s key to remember, however, is that it is not only money that you are receiving in return for your added value. You get a lot more from good employers.
So what is your product? And if you are a manager what’s your brand? Value of your product or the brand will determine your worth.
Shooting the breeze
With ‘work from home’ and the ‘non-office’ culture, today we have moved to the transactional work culture. If you need something, you will most likely go online and buy it. There are no chances here, only options and the power of choice. Every decision I make is based on what I see…not loyalty, not relationship and not trust. If I didn’t like what I bought, I will return it and write a review and buy from someone else next time.
The world as we knew it is changing. Services today are also slated to become transactional. The whole concept of meeting in office spaces and making small talk or “shooting the breeze” does not happen anymore.
Value in skills
Try to imagine doing your job without the processes, systems, factories, and products that your place of work provides you. What are your skills on the computer assembling line worth if there are no assembling lines or materials to transform? My guess would be not too much. Some people and some jobs don’t need infrastructure provided by an employer to realise the value in their skills. These are people who have the know-how, competence and the gumption to create value for others on their own. They create their own systems, their own infrastructure. But though many more people could probably learn to have the know-how, competence and gumption to create value on their own, most people don’t.
Many because they can’t, many because they have never thought of it and many because they prefer to work within systems that other people created that permit them to add value. Which is absolutely okay if that is what they want. That is one of the things you are bartering for when you agree to take a job.
Twofold
The point of this is twofold. One, to understand that you are owed nothing. You have a job because your company believes it is profitable to have you working for them. If you fall back on your side of the bargain, namely if you consistently bring in less value than they are paying out to you, then you should be fired.
Two, it’s to have a little humility in the face of your place of work. To understand that your wage or salary is not the only thing you are getting in return for your hard work and time. You are literally getting a place that allows your skills and know-how to produce value for yourself and others. A place that allows your value to mean something.
But like any business transaction or trade, if you feel you are not getting your due, walk away from it. Just as you would not buy a ten dollar apple at the supermarket, you should not sell your value for less than what you think its worth. The only caveat I would add to that, however, is that your own perceptions of the value you can produce need to be grounded in the real world.
This is based on the real world outcomes that you have produced. Because at the end of the day, if you feel you are worth 200 dollars an hour, while everyone else you talk to thinks you are worth twenty dollars an hour, you’re either consistently talking to the wrong people, or you are living in a fantasy world. Only be a party to fair transactions but your measure of fairness needs to be ground in reality. There’s no way around this.
In the cut-throat world that we live in, what we offer, be it a service or a product, needs to be so unique that our target consumer will buy it from us, and that’s the only way to go. A transactional association with work where you trade time for money without any other benefits can make one feel empty and seem like a waste of time.
