The Five R Factors Of Your Job

Hi, truly it is not a comfortable time for anyone to read a serious talk on management or finance during the fasting month. With all respect, may I start this article with an appreciation and addressing my highest respect to you all my friends who are now in fasting. Hope this article would be useful to you and provide an enlightening ideas to you.

Now let me open a discussion and talks on the five R of your work or your job or your career. I won't be rushing to talk on the meaning and the difference between work, job and career, but I will talk more on the things you should get and gain upon your highly committed work thru your job and your career. Before I explain what are those five R anyway, let me just remind you some important statistics about your work :

If you work between 8 to 5, and it take you another hour each to get to your office and get back to your home, means you already spend 11 out of your 24 hours given to your life everyday. It is already 46% of your time you spend outside your home, off the way in distance with your family. But wait, in fact you will spend 6 to 8 hours to sleep, right ? Let's make it minimum : 6 hours a day to sleep. Then your available time excluding sleep is only 18 hours a day, and spending 11 hours outside your home is becoming 61% already you are far from your family. Would it be more meaningful and worth to do if you know better what you should have and gain from your work ?

Remunerations

Surely the phrase 'to work' is 'to trade' your potential, skills and expertise to get paid, as well as possible. All can accept it. But the matter here is : are you well paid enough correlating to the work you do and the contribution you give to your employer ? I will be excluding a field work or other harsh example of underpaid work or very risky type of work that doesn't worth the double payment even. But I just recently get the real example on a multinational insurer in town who is now suffering high turn over even they pay their people about 20% higher from the upper scale of salary range in the market. What happened ?

Later, it is revealed also that they have a messy operational and managerial systems thus the staffs required to work overtime and in a long hours, and once any issue is resolved by an automation, the long working hours is already becoming a culture. The work life balance seems to be something imaginary and the balance is never tell you any mistake : people would always leave, even if they are paid 20% more, once they realize that they have to work 40% more in constant basis. Why ? You know this..

Recognition

One of the highest need of an individual is an esteem. You can gather it from anywhere and anytime, but in fact it is not something commonly found in the office world. Some office politics may bring a barrier to some people to get the fair and deserved recognition. But indeed the stiff and well established managerial system seems doesn't allow individual player a large room. All are set to be a collective performance (but in other side ironically judged the mistakes as an individual attribute...).

The healthy work environment, the clever managerial system, the fair performance management processes and the worthy work to be committed in, is a work (or job or career) that would bring more attribute to individual performance and achievement, that would allow more recognition comes to individuals, and that allow the recognition becomes something natural and going in a fair way. It sounds simple but not that simple in practice. That's why the majority of jobs doesn't deserve the predicate of dream job if measured by this matter.

Rewards

The fair trade is always the best way to run the venture, an ancient Arabs proverb says. It is correct anyway, but how often you have heard people saying "you are an employee not a commission based agent, thus you get your salary paid to your account for whatever your work is, good or bad, you are guaranteed to receive the same amount of wages paid to your account". It is very wrong dear..

Let us leave the shadow of communist style management as the saying quoted above. Some guys have all the luck, some guys get all the breaks, some guys have all the rain, some guys do nothing but complain, sing Rod Stewart. You see that some individuals are worth to retain, to develop and to motivate for further achievement. While some other may need spank in the ass, never never ever delete the word 'Reward' from your office management's dictionary. If you are not rewarded apart from your monthly salary and wages for any good work to do, while the office policy doesn't allow them to do so, please just simply see your work as some kind worthless.

Reputations

For this part, you are not alone responsible for it. It is a complex thing actually since reputation is built not just from your prolong high performance and professional attitude as acknowledged in the market, but it also would reflect the reputation of the company you are working for. To add more slippery liquid in your path to build reputation, it also involving the reputation of the clients you have working in, the project you have been working in, and the type of work you have been engaged in. And do not forget.. some bad reputation bosses are inheriting their notoriety to their staffs' reputation.. "oooh i see so you worked for Mr X, right"... sounds familiar ?

If you see, again only if you see, that all of those external factors : company reputation, the client reputation, your boss(es) reputation, your project and account reputation, all are not working in your favor, be considerable to check another opportunity. Losing your personal time worth more highly reputed work to carry.

Reference

In the end, what you can keep from whatever you do in the past is a good reference. Reference on how good you are, on what the expertises you are possessing, and the exposures you had in the job you have performed. Be sure that your current works would result the good reference that is acceptable in the market. Also be sure that once the company provides the reference on you, it is credible enough to justify your qualifications in the market. Surely as the recruiter you won't even consider a good reference of a candidate who "worked for out of top ten rank in the industry, in the industry that is not the spotlighted industry, and for the non core functions".

Another meaning of reference is truly about reference, where you can obtain knowledge, know how, and other technical ideas on how to do things and whom to be linked into for various purpose related to the job you carry. If you work for a solitary function that might be important but only exist in your company, then what for ?

on twitter @katjoengkampret | katjoengkampret@aol.com