Employee and Employer: A Bitter-Sweet Love Story

You are a job aspirant. Having come across a suitable opening, you apply for the job. Your C.V. is so impressive that you immediately get a call for an interview. You attend the interview and are appointed as well. You undergo an orientation training that cements your bonding with the company. After that, you start working for the company. In other words, you get cozy with the company.

You complete all the tasks entrusted to you perfectly. You give suggestions as well to improve the output of the company. So, your employer develops a liking for you. This is a sweet love story.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Very soon, people on your team and other employees find fault with you. This may be due to jealousy. Or you may be going overboard and in your enthusiasm to improve your reputation further, committing a few mistakes. In your eagerness and obsession to prove your mettle and to beat others in the race, you may commit the solecism of prioritizing wrongly or omitting a few vital aspects while carrying out your tasks. This may prove to be expensive for the company. Now, your employer may start disliking you or may even begin hating you. The love story, which was originally sweet, has now turned into a bitter one. 

Another scenario.

Noticing your efficiency, your employer may start dumping more work on your platter. You have all along been enjoying the appreciation showered upon you. Now when you have to do more work, you find that your work-life balance is in jeopardy. You start hating your employer. Thus begins the bitter chapter of the love story.

Should an employer-employee relationship always be a bitter-sweet love story?

To this question, the answer is: It need not be. The question now is: As an employee, what should you do to maintain a consistently cordial relationship with your employer? A few tips may help.

1. Never nurture an obsession to impress your employer. As an employee, you have to work to your optimum potential and there should not be any compromise on this. But while carrying out your tasks, you should have the company's good in your mind. Earning the employer's appreciation is secondary and you will get it automatically if you carry out your tasks sincerely and with the utmost focus.

2. Do not always be expecting appreciation. Some of the employers are stingy and they do not appreciate even those who perform well. According to them, employees get their remuneration and it compensates much more than their output. So, don't get addicted to appreciative remarks. This means that when you don't get an appreciation for your good work, you must not allow your buoyancy to diminish. Remember that the appreciative words of such stingy employers are just formal proclamations and are devoid of hearty effusiveness. 

At the same time, these employers will always take advantage of every opportunity to find faults. Expecting appreciation from these employers is akin to expecting inanimate things to show gratitude.

3. Don't try to monopolize appreciation. You want to climb the career ladder quickly. This does not mean that you and you alone should get appreciation. There may be a few other employees like you who may be nurturing similar aspirations. They may also be performing as good as you, if not better. They also deserve appreciation, so you should not be envious of them. The only advice experts give is that you should carry out your tasks with the utmost sincerity and focus without worrying about the appreciation of your employer. It is better if you continue to be companionable with those employees because their eagerness to perform well will help in keeping your motivation level high.

4. Keep your enthusiasm alive. Regardless of whether you get appreciation from your employer or not, you should not allow your enthusiasm to come down. Enthusiasm is like a nasty precipice. If you do not motivate yourself regularly, you may slip and it may result in troubles in your workplace. Of course, your relationship with your employer will get strained also. So, employ all your resources and keep your enthusiasm intact.

If you use the above tips, you will find that the relationship between you and your employer need not be a bitter-sweet love story. It will always be a sweet love story.

Are You an Employee? Understand This Career Math

Quick career growth may be the aspiration of almost every employee and you may not be an exception. Of course, this is not a solipsistic attitude and there is nothing unethical about it. But to achieve this aim, you must first understand what is popularly known as "Career Math." You may like to discover what this means and how to go about it.

What is career math?

We all know that mathematics involves the four main operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So, when you try to understand career math, you should know the items you should add, those you should subtract, the ones you should multiply, and those you should divide. Let us look at these in the same order.

Things you should add:

You may strictly abide by the instructions and carry out the tasks assigned to you. But this is not enough to have quick career growth. You must always ensure to do something more than the tasks assigned. For example, after completing your tasks, you can assist other team members in their tasks. Further, you can use your creative juices and come out with innovative suggestions to improve the output of your team or the whole organization. Doing so will certainly give you the reputation of being a valuable employee. This will increase your chances of getting quick elevations to higher positions.

Things you should shun.

This forms the subtraction part of the career math. Topping this list is stopping to be rebellious. This does not mean that you should not point out the mistakes or errors in the systems or processes. You must be polite and at the same time, analytical in your approach. Of course, a large dose of diplomacy will do a world of good in enhancing the value of your handling. 

Secondly, you must never, never resort to unethical ways to promote your cause or improve your reputation. Never forget the fact that the reputation you may earn by back-biting, gossiping, or talking ill of others may not be permanent. Those who hold high positions may have several eyes and ears and they will soon find out your true intentions.

Thirdly, you should not drift even an inch from your loyalty to your company. Instances of people's lives getting ruined due to disloyalty to their companies abound in corporate history. So, you must be very careful because there may be alluring situations that may tempt you.

Multiplication in the career math.

The multiplication process happens when you can slash the number of hours you take to complete tasks so that the value of your output increases in geometric proportions. How can you do this? An example will explain this clearly. There may be several routine tasks. Unfortunately, they may be so important that you cannot dispense with them. You may have to do them daily and consistently. If you develop well-structured templates, you can complete the tasks in a jiffy. This is one of the major steps with the help of which you can drastically reduce the number of hours you spend on these routine tasks. This will amazingly bring about a "multiplier effect" on your output. 

The role of division in your career math.

Division in the career math is nothing but the popular concept of "Division of Labor." Every management may want to leverage the optimum potential of their employees. They may accomplish this aim by assessing the capabilities and skills of the employees. There may be one or more employees in your company who may be good at sifting data and presenting them in a concise and comprehensible form. A few other employees may excel in project management and yet a few others may have good knowledge of accounting, administration, or marketing. 

Being a member of your team, you should ensure that there is complete coordination between your output and those of other team members. Similarly, the output of your team should gel with those of other teams. For example, the team that does development-related tasks should coordinate with the operations team. Of course, there are tools such as DevOps to handle such coordination efforts.

So, how does division fit into career math? Dividing and assigning tasks according to the capabilities and skills of the teams or employees is how division fits into the career math. Regardless of your position in the hierarchy of the company, you should ensure that your output is in tandem and in synergy with the team's or company's goals. 

To conclude, understanding the above career math is important to succeed in your aim of accelerating the pace of your growth in your career.

How to Leverage Your Productivity to Climb up the Career Ladder?

Like all employees, you should climb the career ladder quickly. You are aware that the management of your company expects you to achieve optimum productivity. But whether you know how to leverage your productivity to the fullest extent is a big question.

Before knowing how to leverage your productivity, you should understand what productivity is. "Productivity is a measure of output relative to input." You are wrong if you think you can improve your productivity by working more hours. Productivity is not related to the time you spend on your tasks. Then, how do you improve your productivity?

Try this way.

Before you begin any task, please suspend your activities for a while. Remember that there are multiple ways to carry out any task. If you apply your mind, you can easily find and zero in on the smartest way to do the task. Experts like James Altucher suggest: "Think of 10 new ideas daily," You should practice this consistently and improve your creativity. Enhanced creativity will help improve productivity, say experts.

What is the main benefit you will get by embracing the above suggestion?

The best benefit you will get by following this suggestion meticulously is that by choosing the most appropriate way to carry out your tasks, you will start working smartly instead of sweating and toiling for hours and hours. So, the measure of your output related to your input will increase by several notches. When your productivity improves significantly, your company's management will certainly notice it. So, whatever career growth you have mapped out in your mind will fructify.