Fire Your Boss (19 page)

Culture
. The bohemian, free-spirited culture of the radio station was one that Debbie adored, having been part of similar cultures in the past. The satellite radio job, on the other hand, had a much more corporate culture. Advantage: Radio.

Disability insurance
. Neither job offered disability insurance. No advantage.

Environment
. The radio station’s studio was located in a somewhat run-down old office building in midtown Manhattan. The satellite radio company was located in a brand-new facility in a corporate park in suburban New Jersey. Advantage: Satellite.

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EBBIE
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EARY’S
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OMPARISON
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HART

Expense allowance
. Neither job offered an expense allowance. No advantage.

Health insurance
. The radio station did not provide health coverage for part-time employees until they worked for the company for more than two years. The satellite radio company offered a complete health insurance package. Advantage: Satellite.

Income
. Because Debbie was a member of the union she would earn approximately $30,000 a year as a part-time deejay at the radio station. The full-time satellite radio job offered a salary of $75,000. Advantage: Satellite.

Life insurance
. Neither job offered life insurance. No advantage.

Opportunity for advancement
. The radio job gave Debbie the chance to move eventually into a full-time deejay job with a regular air shift. The structure of the satellite radio company seemed to provide little chance for upward movement for programmers. Instead, there would be lateral movement to other genres. Advantage: Radio.

Opportunity for learning
. Debbie could do the radio job in her sleep. The satellite job would require her to learn the dynamics of a new segment of the radio business, and a new musical genre. Advantage: Satellite.

Paid time off.
The radio job gave no paid vacation or personal days to part-timers. As a fill-in, Debbie would probably be working many if not all holidays. The satellite job offered two weeks’ paid vacation and four paid personal days each year. Advantage: Satellite.

Proximity
. The radio job was a thirty-minute subway ride each way from Debbie’s apartment. The satellite job was a forty-five minute combined subway and commuter train trip each way. Advantage: Radio.

Retirement plan
. The radio station had no retirement plan for part-timers. The satellite job offered a 401(k) plan and matched annual contributions up to a certain amount. Advantage: Satellite.

Stability
. While radio wasn’t a secure industry, the station where Debbie would be working had been one of the two top FM rock radio stations in the New York market for more than a decade. The satellite radio company was a start-up in a new industry. Advantage: Radio.

Status
. Being a programmer for a satellite radio network didn’t have anywhere near the status of being an on-air personality in America’s largest media market. Advantage: Radio.

Title
. The title of deejay carried no particular weight — what mattered were the size of the market and the ratings. Program director was a more advanced title in the business, implying a step up the management hierarchy. Advantage: Satellite.

Tuition reimbursement
. Neither job offered tuition reimbursement. No advantage.

Unpaid time off.
Because it was a part-time job, the deejay position didn’t provide lots of unpaid time off. The satellite job offered ten days’ unpaid parental leave. Advantage: Radio.

Analyzing the offers in this manner convinced Debbie her husband and I were probably right in discouraging her from reflexively grabbing the deejay job. However, it also showed neither job offer was perfect.

Debbie’s realization that neither job was perfect shouldn’t have come as a shock. No job is going to be perfect and offer the best of all these factors. It’s also unlikely any one job will offer clear advantages over another job in every single one of these categories. If it did there really wouldn’t be a choice; it would be obvious which was better. In order to weigh the offers you’ll be receiving because of your successful job fishing, you need to prioritize these factors.

Let’s go back to our going - out - to - dinner scenario. Both choices — the local diner and the French restaurant — have their advantages, so you need to prioritize the factors involved to make your choice. If spending less money, for instance, is a priority, you’ll opt for the diner. If, on the other hand, having a relaxing dining experience is your priority, the French restaurant will be your choice. You need to go through a similar process when it comes to choosing between job offers. The problem is that many of my clients, and I’m afraid many of you, seem to spend as little time determining their priorities in choosing one job offer over another as in deciding whether to go to the diner or the French restaurant.

Just as we’ve let false idealism cloud our eyes as to the purpose work should serve in our lives, we’ve let it cloud our eyes as to what our priorities should be in choosing one job offer over another. If you continue to believe work is an end in itself, and that the psychological rewards you receive from it are more important than any material rewards, you’re going to place a priority on those factors that seem to offer psychological value. On the other hand, if you accept, as I’ve been urging, that work is simply a means to an end, and that therefore the material rewards it offers are the most valuable, you’ll place priority on an entirely different set of factors. Since you’ll be getting emotional, psychological, and spiritual rewards from your personal life, you won’t need to get them from your work life, and as a result, some of the factors that used to loom large should no longer matter as much.

And just as we’ve let others determine our work futures, we’ve let them convince us what our priorities should be. It’s the role of a company to be as profitable as possible. Part of its effort to maximize profits is to increase efficiency. While there are lots of ways to do that, the most common is to get as much work from employees as possible, while paying them as little as possible. In that effort, companies have worked hard to offer “psychic” as opposed to financial rewards to employees, knowing that doing so is in the company’s best interest. For instance, it costs nothing to give an employee a fancy title, but giving him a raise impacts the bottom line. Similarly, companies do everything they can to get employees to work longer hours without paying more money. Some simply issue threats, covertly or overtly, saying the extended hours are a requirement for keeping your job. Others are more subtle and sophisticated, and try to make the workplace as much like home as possible and coming in early and staying late at the job as convenient as possible. These efforts fit neatly into the mind-set that you live to work, and that your identity is wrapped up in your job. Abandon those notions and these efforts lose their power over you.

Whenever I go over the list of factors that I believe are no longer important in selecting one job offer over another, my clients’ jaws drop. That’s because, as you’ll see, many of these unimportant factors are exactly those that are most touted by employers and employees alike as being what makes a wonderful place to work. That proves my point. I think it’s more important for home to be a wonderful place to live than for your job to be a wonderful place to work.

Amenities
. I’m always amazed at the extent to which some companies will go to bring their employees in early and keep them there late. Company gyms, cafeterias, and day-care centers are all terrific for people who want to spend most of their lives in the office or at the plant. But you want to spend as much time at home as you can. As a result, these amenities will actually interfere with your goals. The same goes for the concierge-type services being offered by cutting-edge firms today. If the company will pick up your dry cleaning and prescriptions for you, you’ll end up staying later than you should. Remember: the goal is to separate your work and your personal lives, not blur them into one. Whenever there’s a blurring of that line, work wins out over life.

Auto
. Company cars benefit the company, not the employee. They are issued only when it makes more financial sense for the company to lease a fleet of vehicles than to reimburse employees for use of their own vehicles. Using your own car for work needn’t be a burden. Auto leases allow people to obtain use of late-model cars for less money than it costs to buy them. Expenses incurred by the business use of your car that aren’t reimbursed by your employer can be used as a deduction on your income tax return. The only purpose served by your getting a company car is that it makes you feel more important and valued.

Challenging
. I get a lot of reflexive resistance from clients when I tell them a job’s being challenging isn’t an important factor. “But it’s important to me to be challenged,” is the usual first response. Followed by, “If I’m going to be working long hours I’ll need to be motivated.” I agree it’s important to have challenges in life…but they don’t need to come from work. God knows raising a child is a challenge. So is renovating a bathroom. Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a physical challenge…and reading James Joyce is an intellectual one. Thinking your challenges must come from work is indicative of old-style thinking. Stop living to work and start working to live. Similarly, you don’t need challenges to keep all those hours at work interesting, because you won’t be spending all those hours at work anymore. By focusing on helping your boss meet his or her needs you’ll earn the freedom to spend less time at work and more time at home…where you’ll find all the really rewarding challenges in life.

Culture
. I’ll admit that, all other things being equal, it would be better to work for a company of whose values you approve. But it certainly should not be a deciding factor in choosing one job over another. Placing a high priority on a company’s culture says to me that you’re still viewing yourself as an employee first and an individual second. There are horrible people who work for Ben & Jerry’s and wonderful people who work for Philip Morris. And there are wonderful people at Ben & Jerry’s and horrible people at Philip Morris. Where people choose to work has no bearing on what type of people they are. I’d suggest you don’t get wrapped up arguing corporate morality either. Philip Morris does make products that can give people cancer. But Ben & Jerry’s makes products that can make people obese, which could lead to fatal heart attacks. As long as you’re doing honest work it doesn’t matter for whom you do it. The place to express your values is in your personal life. Lead a good life, that’s what matters. There’s nothing contradictory about working at Anheuser-Busch and being an active member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. You are not your job and your job is not you.

Environment
. The only environmental issue I think should enter into your decision-making process when choosing one job offer over another is safety. If your life will be in danger at one of the workplaces under consideration, scratch it off your list. Otherwise you should ignore your surroundings. Don’t get me wrong: it’s nicer to work in a lovely bright private office with windows overlooking a magnificent mountain range than in a dark interior cubicle piled high with boxes. But that shouldn’t be a factor in your choice. Employers create pleasant work environments, not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they think it will keep you at your desk longer and/or improve your work. The more homelike your workplace, the more time you’ll spend there. I believe the opposite is true as well. The more businesslike your workplace, the less time you’ll work there and the more time you’ll spend at home. That’s why I encourage my clients not to personalize their work spaces. I don’t think you should have anything in your work space that you couldn’t carry home with you in your briefcase or shoulder bag at the end of the day. Resist the urge to put down psychological or physical roots in the workplace. I’ve actually encouraged clients who were long-term employees at a prior employer to bring every trace of themselves home every night — packing up the family photo on their desk and their coffee cup. I’m trying to reinforce that a workplace isn’t a haven and it shouldn’t be a home.

Expense allowance.
I’ve never understood clients who viewed expense allowances as a positive factor in a job offer. The two most common allowances I’ve run across in my practice are companies that offer their outside salespeople a certain amount each month as an automobile allowance, and media companies that offer their executives a monthly stipend for clothing. For some reason, clients see these as being bonuses piled on top of their salary. In reality, I think they’re indicative of an employer’s efforts to control an employee’s life. The employer is saying you can have this money as long as you spend it on something of which I approve and that benefits the company. If it’s important for you to have a car for business, and the company is willing to spend, say, $500 a month on an auto allowance, it should simply add that $500 into your monthly salary and leave it to you to decide how much you need to spend on transportation. So, far from being important positive factors, I see expense allowances as warning signs of controlling employers.