With the current economic crunch going on, keeping your job is as important to you as cutting costs is to your employer. Make sure you’re nowhere near the list of “expendables” by avoiding these traits that could make you history.
With the economy down in the dumps, layoffs have become a sad fact of life. In larger corporations, downsizes are usually broad and indiscriminate. But if you work in a smaller office, cutbacks are likely to be more surgical, heavily relying on the discretion of direct superiors rather than corporate executives who’ve never set foot in your building, let alone your cubicle.
In situations like these, the squeaky wheel gets the pink slip. Obviously problematic employees get canned first, followed by the under productive and overpaid. After the bulk of the gristle is trimmed, otherwise upstanding employees may find themselves on the chopping block simply because they are a nuisance to the boss.
This may not always be the case, but when it comes to quantifying the performance of individual employees across departments, management will likely find that they are comparing apples to apples – apples which are discernible only by their blemishes. As such, it’s in your best interests to stay under the radar to avoid being flagged.
Here are a couple examples of the kind of outstanding employees you don’t want to be.
1. The Slacker
Meet The Slacker. Don’t confuse him with The Delinquent – the guy who snuck in 30 minutes late every Friday morning, nursing a hangover and a high score on Tetris. That guy’s already been fired.
The Slacker actually does his job to a T. But there’s the rub: he follows precisely what the “help wanted” ad on Craigslist delineated four years ago – doing no more or no less than his job description demands. If he was hired to clock 40 hours a week, he punches in at exactly 9:00am and slams his laptop shut at 5:00pm. E-mail him at 5:01pm and you’ll get his Out of Office Autoreply – he’s already on the elevator.
The Slacker’s motto is “It’s not my job.” When the boss sends out an e-mail asking for a favor, it either gets forwarded to another department or straight to the recycle bin. Phones will ring and ring in his presence, and clients will be left hanging at the front desk. “I’m an analyst, not a receptionist,” he says.
The Slacker will (grudgingly) take on extra tasks that are directly assigned to him, but will feign ignorance when the boss drops hints that coming in this weekend to finish up a project would “be just great.” It wasn’t mandatory, right?
Once upon a time, this fellow wouldn’t even be called a slacker. He is, after all, fulfilling his duties. But with a market flooded with eligible candidates all vying for the same coveted position, an employer can’t afford to hire the guy who does the bare minimum. It’s like buying toothpaste – why get the Crest when the Crest with Whitening is the same price?
As interdepartmental cutbacks are made, businesses need employees who can pick up the slack and shoulder the burdens of their recently fallen comrades. One trick ponies are dead weight and will likely be sent out to pasture in the next round of downsizing.
2. The Excusinator
A distant cousin of The Slacker, The Excusinator is always on the defense. He too is a proponent of the “It’s not my job,” mantra, but he’s an even bigger fan of the “It’s not my fault,” line.
Just like The Terminator has a bad ass weapon to assassinate every type of puny human, The Excusinator has an arsenal of cop outs ready to shoot down any criticism. A file gets lost? He didn’t have it last. A typo goes out to the client? Someone else should have proof read it. Deadline missed? Printer on fire? Messages forgotten? Maybe the communication from the top wasn’t clear enough…
The Excusinator’s defensiveness, while designed to deflect disapproval away from him, is actually counterproductive. He’ll spend hours compiling evidence that it wasn’t his bad, when really, he should be devoting that time to rectifying the faux pas. By the time a mistake happens, the supervisor isn’t particularly concerned with who flubbed it – management only cares about two things: solution and prevention.
The Excusinator would be better off handling accusations the way super rich defendants in class actions do: by neither denying or acknowledging wrongdoing and settling the matter out of court. The proper response to an angry e-mail regarding a glaring mistake is “I’ll fix it; it won’t happen again.”
No one cares that your dog is sick or you have dyslexia or your intern got a concussion or the feng shui is off in your cube. The only important thing is that the problem is being solved.
Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.
