This may sound very counter-intuitive when it comes to your career and its eventual advancement, but there may be a time that doing your job actually harms more than helps. Many organizations are currently embracing a teamwork environment designed to encourage all members of the staff to work together for the greater good and, eventually, their individual success. But what happens when the system isn’t designed to optimize the experience for everyone and the end result is few hard workers subsidizing the rest? Here are some of the reasons you may want to strategically decide not to do your job in a way that will help you advance your career.
Local versus global objectives
Local objectives refer to the goals of individual employees, usually framed in terms of incentives. Global objectives are the goals of the entire company. Sometimes the company goals, such as strong customer service mindset, are in direct opposition to the local goals like incentives to only keep customers on the phone for a short period of time, in order to take more calls.
Performance metrics
When an employee is measured by their individual performance, that may not reflect what is relevant to the company as a whole. For instance, an employee who has a high customer service rating may in fact be suffering based on the metrics which only review their call times and how long it took them to address a customer’s concern, but not necessarily solve it.
Incentivizing objectives
When these objectives become incentivized, there is little reason for employees to look at the overall company objectives rather than the ones that benefit them as individuals. This can lead to a breakdown in the overall company mission but each employee would be conducting their job by the expectation placed on them as individuals.
The fruits of moral hazards.
Economists refer to doing the wrong thing because you won’t have to face the consequences a “moral hazard.” When poor customer services is incentivized, even at the direct opposition to the companies mission to increase customer satisfaction, an employee may choose to keep calls abrupt without solving the problem because their job will not be in jeopardy. In fact, it will be rewarded.
Embracing the devil you know.
Most companies continue to fall back on individual incentives without even recognizing how these might affect the overall company vision. It is a matter of inertial. Employees will do this as well because working toward the global objective will actually decrease their ability to meet their local objective. There comes a time when everyone needs to step back and reconsider the options.
Do you want to work for a company that creates a culture of success? Harvard Resource Solutions is hiring for jobs in Troy MI so call us now!
