Year end is coming, most people will be pondering their next financial milestone: promotion, pay increment, bonus.
Exciting period and yet, many will face anxiety, nervousness and maybe even fear.
Bonus so little, no promotion, pay increase like no increase.
“Work so hard also no use.”
It’s not just an individual mentality problem, it’s a wide spread economics problem.
To meet all employees’ yearly demand for rise and bonuses, the whole company had to get more deals and business, which will add more workload to everyone and the cycle continues. And the stress comes when companies hit bottlenecks in expansion but employees are still expecting yearly increments.
I used to think that in order to solve this mentality crisis, we should all have our salary be entirely commission based. (tied to business earnings, or profit sharing)
Exact calculations aside, if even a backend office admin salary is purely commission based, wouldn’t he be in a happier mentality? The faster and the more work he clears, the more efficient the company is, and the more business the company could take in at any time. And thus, he will be more in control of his take home. The company make more, you also make equally more, fair!
I was quite wrong.
The truth is, most people are only willing to do the above if the company is doing well, business is increasingly doing better and better.
The fact is, if a backend admin salary is tied to the company’s sales, he would have little control over product sales. And if the sales team did badly that year, he would have suffered a poor salary even if he was doing the best admin job ever.
And ultimately, he will be back at cursing the same thing “work so hard also no use…”
How can we break this bottleneck then?
Boss mentality.
What if, this backend admin can adopt the mentality of being the boss of the company? If he can understand why his work needs to be done, how his work can be done and how his work contributes to the bottom line, he can then control his outcome and ultimately, his income and happiness.
By placing himself into a boss mentality position, he may then find that he is wasting precious money and time doing certain tasks inefficiently, he may come up with more efficient solutions to complete his work and even implement it across the business, he may find outsourcing a better fit for the company and save the company more resources and time, he might optimize the company’s backend so efficiently that nothing else is left to do and the next thing would be participating in discussions on the company’s expansion to a different segment to implement the entire backend in that segment again. By this time, he would most probably be a director/partner level, or in my terms, boss level. From taking instructions on how to get the work done, to giving instructions on how to do the work better.
Boss mentality is just an analogy. The more correct word is control.
Most people are ultimately not unhappy because of being paid less. Most are actually unhappy because they have little control over how they are earning their income.
多我一人少我一人無關緊要. I am but a single nameless employee in the entire company.
How do you choose to think then?
Thank you for reading. Talk is cheap.
~ at the highest level, you must constantly be in a position to lose your job in order to keep it.