Stellar Employees Create Bigger Problems
Why going above and beyond is a bad idea.
The psychology and ethics of work is always something that darts around my consciousness on my day-to-day life. When is a job worth working and how much work should I contribute each day. When it’s a straightforward job like being a mechanic, a plumber, a carpenter, or a writer there is a tangible goal to be obtained. A car needs to run efficiently, a toilet needs to dispel waste, a door needs to be framed, an essay needs to be cohesive and digestible (like this tangential slop).
Unfortunately, not all jobs have concrete descriptions in their title and the tasks of the day can vary from nuance to tedious to inappropriate. Often this is noticed in the white-collar office job where it’s a matter of completing paperwork or software prompts, compiling data and sending emails to give or receive tasks for the day. When the daily tasks become abstract or distant from your original job description than you can’t really determine the worth of your position and this is when the existential crisis starts to grow.
But this isn’t about the dread of what your job title means to your identity, I have already addressed that in a different essay over here. This is more about the mental minefield of workplace productivity. I wrote the context above of comparing tangible work to abstract work because this is about a workplace sickness I have come to resent, that dreaded concept of “going above and beyond” at your job.
On the surface being associated with that statement when it comes to your job performance seems like a bonus goal to achieve. Surely if I show my employers and peers that I am not only carrying out my daily tasks but contributing extra for the benefit of my workplace, then I should be entitled to a promotion or some larger form of compensation. This math equation of more-good-work-equals-more-good-rewards is often a myth. At least in a sustainable and longitudinal manner when it comes to a career that you will invest years to decades of your life in.
A job is a commitment that you are agreeing to participate in, with the legal expectation of being compensated financially for it. While that arrangement is simple enough, people make it complicated and when it comes to the perspective of job performance, it turns into psychological warfare. The basic standard of compensation is how much money are you going to earn for an hour of your job. That seems easy enough to comprehend but if you are at your job over the span of eight hours or more, is every hour equal in terms of what you accomplished? Is writing an email response to your coworkers the same as sorting through paperwork or equal in complexity to solving a problem. To itemize and evaluate every hour of a job is not an easy task if the tasks to be completed aren’t clear and direct to identify, so this becomes another persons’ job to monitor and evaluate performance; i.e. a manager.
When the dynamic of employment becomes caught up on productivity rather that daily accomplishments it dilutes the importance of the job. If a manager is pressured by their overseers to make sure that employees do better and stay on track to progress, then the momentum can derail or crash into a larger issue. The reason that I argue that “going above and beyond” is a problem is because it stems from this larger delusion that only progress is allowed. It seems that just getting to work and completing the tasks of the day isn’t enough in the eyes of those ambitious (read: deluded) overseers that want to keep expanding their enterprise. There is a limit to how large a company can be until it either absorbs its competitors or gets absorbed.
The true reason for being hesitant about going “above and beyond” is that when you expand upon the scope of your work to where you are surpassing your cohorts and carrying the load of more than one person, you are indirectly making three different psychological conclusions form. First you are saving an overseer money in their mind (these people have short attention spans and are not as good at math as they claim to) because they think that one great employee could replace two or three or a dozen other employees. A company boss will never hesitate to eliminate a position when they decide that it will save them money by having one less salary to contribute to, so when someone goes above and beyond, the boss smells and opportunities to cut out employees that are not performing well enough.
The second foolish conclusion, leading off that last sentence, is that when you exceed your expected goal of performance, you are making new standard that your company will expect more often. Production addicts in the predator world of modern capitalism don’t like the reality of maintaining a good practice but would rather worship the growth of their business, to them the only answer that is acceptable is: number go up! When an employee has to carry the weight of others because of varying circumstances like several sick calls, a staffing shortage, or high demands that don’t translate to human working conditions, then you have to temporarily take the brunt of the workload and achieve success. But this momentary anomaly is now the expectation by the overseers, so now that day or week of hell where you had to skip your lunch break, hold in your pee for hours, or stayed late, becomes the norm. A norm that is unsustainable and leads to burnout and resentment when conditions don’t stabilize for the employee.
The third conclusion is that of resentment by your peers. Whether legitimate or exaggerated, when a fellow coworker sees you give extra effort to meet the goals, and it becomes praised by the overseers then working conditions become tense. The peer employee may be lazy in their work practice and feel that your great performance is overshadowing or demeaning their performance, but this is more a problem of their lack of motivation and investment in their job. It has more validity to it when their performance is in line with their role and they are making the standard success. But when the threshold is lifted by your above and beyond antics, the standard is changed (as mentioned above) which can jeopardize the peer’s job for either not meeting this new quota or their lesser performance becoming justification for their termination. This anxiety of your stellar work threatening your coworker’s jobs creates an environment where support becomes scarce and respect fades away.
Given all that can occur with going “above and beyond” it seems like readers will conclude that I’m suggesting that you shouldn’t try harder at your job. But I’m not suggesting sloth in the workplace. You should complete the tasks that you agreed to take on at your job, I don’t want to subscribe to the practice of quiet quitting. Instead, I want to warn you off the dangers of adding more to your plate than what you originally signed up for.
As an employee you are in a tricky social dynamic with another human being who can cast judgment on you that can impair your ability to pay your bills and feed your family if they want to fire you. Give that looming threat, many want to stay in good graces with their employers and then a dom-sub power dynamic can take place if the employer sense the fear of their employee. When you do go above and beyond, take time to review why you did it and decide where you can go from there. Was your excellence a result of your peers not meeting what was expected or staying in a low but acceptable threshold? Does your employer have high and unrealistic expectations of what your company can achieve without incorporating a stable workforce or quality conditions or fair compensation? Can you maintain this level of work every day you clock in or is this just a rare occasion that you would prefer not to experience on a routine basis? If the answer is yes to those questions than be cautious of going above and beyond. It may burn you out or ostracize you from your workforce or leave you as less of a person and more of an obedient robot for someone else’s benefit.
My advice, for whatever it’s worth, is to do well at your job but know how long you want to remain in that position. If you can and want to grow in your company than show that you are a valuable employee, no by burning the midnight oil every night but taking opportunities to help your employer in a reasonable way. But don’t invest your time and energy into a job that isn’t giving back to you in a reasonable way. Ask for a raise, or a promotion, point out the need for help if you’re doing the work of more than one person’s capabilities, and don’t let petty excuses or threats of termination bully you into passive acceptance of shit work conditions. In most jobs, you as an employee are a disposable commodity (sorry to remind you). Even if your performance excels over other people, know that employers don’t think rationally and will gut their best people if they believe they can obtain more wealth, even at the cost of their own business or company. So, tread with caution at your job and know that what you choose to do with your life is something you can’t do over so make your decisions count. Don’t let your bubble burst with bad intentions.