Personal Story

I have not always been the best employee. While I always did my work to the best of my ability and tried hard to complete my tasks on time and without errors, there was at least one company that I had no affection for, and was not in a hurry to do more than what was expected of me. When I worked for this unnamed IT company, I found that their visions did not seem to have my role in them.

I was consistently given work that was simple and could be completed quickly, and rather than find more work to do, I would read news articles and blogs until someone contacted me again for more work. There were days that I spent 8 hours in the office doing nothing related to the company, simply because they had no other work for me and I had no desire to seek out extra work for no extra pay. My employee engagement was low, and there were multiple factors contributing to that problem: I was not rewarded for completing extra work.

Since this job was immediately after college, I couldn’t understand what motivation I had to complete more work than I was expected to do if I was not going to be compensated in some way. I was occasionally reprimanded for asking for more work, as though somehow I had done something wrong by finishing my work before deadline. Indeed, I was often told I needed to “take more initiative” even though my role at the company was only to do what others told me to do – not to get snarky, but by asking them for more work, I was taking initiative.

The company seemed to have no clear plan with how they were going to grow and expand. My own job title I had to make up myself, because the company wanted to find a place for me but didn’t have a spot on hand. From then on, half the time they forgot what department I was in.

There were certainly other reasons as well that my engagement level was low, but at this job it was clear that I was not actively trying to help this company succeed. Some of it was all my fault – certainly it’s common in the business world to not get rewarded for completing extra work, as those with a salary are expected to do whatever work they can for 8 hours a day – but others were not, as getting reprimanded for trying to find more work is a nonsensical stance, and one that contributed to them getting a decrease in potential production out of my role. Had the company focused on engagement better, it’s clear they would have gotten much more production out of my position.