Do you work your butt off for 12 months then hope for some recognition and reward once a year in your annual performance review?
This just in, don’t bet your career on it. Most managers have a difficult time keeping up with all of their corporate projects, let alone remembering all the things you contributed over the last year. Sure, you can document them all and give them to your boss but will it really make that much of a difference?
Is there any chance that they’ll actually compensate you appropriately for the massive time and effort you put in this year? This is more what you’re more likely to hear:
Remember that month where you worked nights and weekends to get that project done? How about that project where you missed vacation and worked like a dog to get it finished on schedule? Since you gave up two months of your life we’ll change this number from a 3 to a 3.5.
Fighting for Pennies
In many cases, managers have a pool of money to split across all of their team for annual increases. In order to give you more, they have to give someone else less. So the amount of your reward is not proportionate to how well you did or how hard you worked but rather how much was allocated to your group for salary increases and how well everyone else in the group did.
Performance Ratings
Don’t even get me started on the corporate merit ranking systems many of us use. Those of us that excel in our jobs really get screwed there. For example, on a performance scale of 1 through 5, one and two mean you’re almost on the way out the door so only slackers get those. No one ever gets a 5, it’s reserved for super human effort that saves/makes the company multiple millions of dollars and requires working 24/7 for months at a time.
Basically the mediocre workers get all 3’s and people like you and I get a few 3.5’s and maybe one or two 4’s. Sound familiar? Is it really worth all of our hard work to get a half point higher merit score which translates to a measly salary increase?
Freedom from Performance Reviews!
What if you take the same amount of effort you put into earning those 3.5’s and 4’s and apply it to your own endeavors? You’ll see rewards much sooner than the end of the year. You won’t have to wait for someone else to maybe recognize your hard work; your effort should result in a much faster increase in income if you’re working for yourself.
Of course you can’t quit your job tomorrow and start earning a salary for yourself the next day, so start building your business today and maybe by next year you’ll be free of your job and giving yourself your own performance review!