Watch Your Work Warranty: Are You An Asset Or Liability to Your Employer?
Monday, October 06, 2014
In this competitive age of employment, many employers are taking a second and third look at employees who obviously are more interested in a paycheck than their job.
During the first few months at a job – or maybe, if you’re lucky, years - new hires try to do as much as they can to impress the new boss and co-workers about how much of a team player they are. Some of these people, mostly college graduates with bachelor's, master's and MBAs are entering the workforce for the first time after being unemployed or underemployed for years.
So what happens when the honeymoon is over?
Work warranty
Every employer knows that unless they have an exceptional employee on your hands, most people have a work warranty – a period of time after which they’re no longer giving their best, and may no longer be good for the company. For some, it may be five years - others may last fifteen years. But most of the time, employers will reevaluate employees on a regular basis to find out whether their work warranty is up.
In this day and age, if you are an employee that thinks his or her job ends at 5 p.m. every day, no matter what kind of business has landed on their lap, who is the last one to show up for work and first one to leave, you may be heading for a problem: The warranty on you, as an employee, is about to expire.
And that is bad for everyone.
Employers in this country are no longer simply looking for a warm body.
In a recent interview by a private employer in Kentucky, the human resources manager got up from the table, walked around for a few minutes during the interview and asked a simple question of the top candidate who was applying for a job that paid nearly $90,000 per year plus bonuses:
“What can you bring to the table that will help increase our sales and bottom line?”
The applicant replied, “Ma'am, I have a master's degree and I know you want educated people for this job.”
Yet that answer was missing something fundamental: The employer was looking for someone who was going to be dedicated to the job and committed to the company. Employers don’t want a high employee turnover any more than employees want to lose their jobs.
A person moving from job to job over a two- to three-year period is a bad investment for any public or private sector employer. But if someone stops contributing to the health of the company, employers will be forced to reevaluate.
How to keep a job
Colleges, universities and trade schools may be good at preparing students for interviews and nailing their first job: What they don't teach their students is the fundamentals of how to keep a job after they are hired.
In urban communities, there is even a much higher rate of employee turnover than the average.
So as an employee or potential employee, you need to ask yourself, what do you bring to the table to help the company or agency be profitable? Showing up and looking cute no longer works. How can you contribute to the company’s bottom line?
Those who have been on the job for 10 to 15 years or more may be the next target of layoffs or termination. I have known people who have worked for companies for nearly 20 years only to get their pink slip from out of the clear blue.
You never want the supervisor to come to you and say, “It’s nothing personal. It’s just business.”
How do you avoid that? Ask yourself if you're an asset or a liability to your employer. And then act like it’s your first day on the job all over again.
You still have to impress the boss. You still have to win over colleagues. Make an impression – and then make that impression last.
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