“The stronger the desire, the greater the motivation. The stronger the motivation the greater the achievement”
Dr. T.P. China
We recently welcomed a new puppy into our family. A very cute black & white English Setter mix with a black patch over one eye that lovingly earned him the name Bandit.
English Setters are bird dogs. Bandits mom lived the ultimate dog life of running free on a farm and I’m sure she chased her fair amount of birds.
We live in the suburbs, about as far away from farm life as possible, We have exactly one tree in our front yard. Now that spring has officially sprung more birds are starting to make an appearance in our yard.
Bandit loves to watch birds. He will paw at the door until we let him out and then he will sit statue still, slowly he will start to approach the birds and assume the typically pointer pose. We have to literally drag him back inside sometimes and within in five minutes he is back at the door.
He has an innate desire to hunt birds, something we have not trained in him. He just knows it was something he was born to do and at his happiest while doing it.
Are you like Bandit ?
Does someone have to physically pull you away from your work because you love it so much?
Do you have trouble sleeping the night before because you are just so excited to go back?
Recent surveys show that overall anywhere from 50-65% of Americans are satisfied with their job. While at first glance that seems good. However if you work at a company with 100 employees that means that at least 35 of them are not happy. Scale that up to a larger organization with 10,000 employees that means 3,500 are not satisfied.
This means that even if you are happy with your job, you are probably working with someone who is not. This can be poison to a company culture.
Is it all about the Benjamins?
In the late 1990’s Hip Hop artist Puff Daddy had a hit, “It’s all about the Benjamins”. Of course all the cool kids know that a Benjamin is slang for a one hundred dollar bill. I typically have way more Washingtons than Benjamins, but that is a different story.
Early in my career I thought job satisfaction followed the paycheck. The more you made the happier you were. The older I get the more I realize this is not entirely true.
Salary is important.
Everyone needs to feel like they are getting paid fairly, but there becomes a point of diminishing returns.
The concept of “golden handcuffs” is real. You can be miserable in a job, but getting paid so much you can’t leave out of fear of the financial impact.
How sad is it to be tethered to a job because of the paycheck?
There will always be time to make more money, they were never be more time to make more time.
The recent phenomena of the great resignation has shown that people are realizing life is too short to be in a job that makes you miserable, even if you are making decent money.
Happy Employees, Happy Life
When Taco Bell CEO Mark King, was asked how his company was handling the current staffing crisis in the food industry, he said, “A living wage is the table stakes to enter, you have to find ways to keep employees”
As the the world grows flatter and employees have far more options about where they want to use their talents. Employers must realize that a fair salary is expected and just gets your company to the table.
It is the esoteric that drive true employee satisfaction.
If your pay is competitive what are you doing to stoke desire in your employees for you company?
As an employee would you take a different job for less money, if you were able to work in a healthy, stimulating and rewarding work environment?
Maybe Puff Daddy wasn’t entirely right when he said it was “All about the Benjamins” maybe we have a lot more to learn from a bird dog.
