Personal Story

A while back I held a job working for a company that took on outsourced projects at a small startup. My role was fairly straight forward – I entered the data they supplied me into spreadsheets. I had no other role in the company – my only job was to enter in data.

But I was also very, very good at it. In fact, compared to the person I replaced, the speed that I could go error free was considered remarkable. What would once take 3 to 4 days to complete would sometimes take me as little as 4 hours.

I was completing work in 1/8 th the time of anyone that came before me, to the point where I would sit there with nothing to do, waiting for someone to give me more work. Luckily, there was more work I could do. I could help out other employees with their work in the interim, keeping myself busy and making their jobs easier.

I was paid a salary – a very low salary for the company. In fact, I was paid less than the person I replaced.

In addition, when I would ask for more work, I wasn’t given praise for completing my work early. I was reluctantly given more work, and at one point was called a “bother” by someone that was tired of me asking for ways to help out. This lead to two problems: By receiving no praise for my good work and being close to reprimanded for constantly asking for work to do, I was given no incentive to ever provide additional help to those that needed it.

At some point I simply hid my computer from view and played around on various websites until a new project came in, even lowering my productivity at some point to make sure the work they gave me took me longer. My satisfaction and my productivity were lower. Despite completing work more quickly, I was offered no financial incentive to continue to work hard.

Indeed, being paid less for doing more projects always seemed like a very useless way to do business. In an ideal world, quality of productivity and pay should be linked, and it was clearly not linked here. So my loyalty scores were low as well, and I was constantly searching for a new place of work that would pay me more.

The above story is designed to illustrate some of the issues that may come up with both satisfaction and loyalty. It’s not necessarily as simple as making a workplace a good environment, and in some ways it’s not as simple as trying to pay your employees more. Rewarding hard work and providing real appreciation (including both financial and intangible) to employees that go above and beyond plays a huge role, and even though we still live in a salary based system, it may be useful to come up with new and inventive ways to compensate employees that put in the extra effort.

Satisfaction and loyalty may depend on these types of changes.