At the risk of sounding like Lumbergh from Office Space, today we're going to talk about the value you can add to your company above and beyond the things listed in your job description and how you can use this to add dollars to your paycheck.
In a recent post on project management, I talked about how start-ups usually have a small number of very focused people who all pitch in to make sure that everything gets done. As a company grows, jobs tend to get more specialized. Everyone doesn't do everything any longer. This is a necessary evolution in the life of a company, but sometimes employees go a little too far in this direction. The last thing any manager ever wants to hear from an employee are the words, "That's not in my job description."
Often, there are tasks that need to be done or tasks that should be done that aren't really part of any job description at a company. One great way to make yourself more valuable to a company is to make those tasks part of your job description. Of course you need to make sure you get all of your regular work done too. But if you see something that needs to be done, and you can do it, pitching in to get things done makes you that much more valuable.
If you are one of those underemployed people I talked about in part two of this series, adding value is a great way to help make your replacement value closer to your market value. (Read part one to learn about your market value.)
Another factor to added value is the amount of experience that you may have at a particular task or piece of technology. Most companies have some sort of esoteric process or technology that really isn't used anywhere else. The people who know this technology very well are more valuable to a company than anyone else out there who has an otherwise similar skill set.
One thing to beware of here is the temptation to horde knowledge. Being the only person who knows how to do some specific task or run some certain piece of technology constitutes a huge risk for a company. If you think that not training anyone else or making management aware of this problem means you have greater job security, you're wrong. From a manager's point of view, you look like someone who is not a team player and someone who can't be bothered to help the company manage a serious risk. The best thing you can do is help your company manage this risk by offering to train others, create documentation others can follow or suggest an alternative solution that doesn't require such specific knowledge.
Another great way to add value is to learn a new skill that can be used at your job immediately. Learning a new skill that makes your more marketable and adds to your market value, but doesn't necessarily make you more valuable to your current employer.
Here's a great example. One company I worked for, needed a back-up person to handle some implementation tasks, but we couldn't quite justify the cost of hiring a new employee. Another employee volunteered to get the training needed and be the backup until we had enough business to justify hiring a new person. That added value.
As a manager, I have always thought about added value when determining salary increases. It's not something you start thinking about the day before you ask for a raise though. It's something you need to think about every day of your career.
In the next post, I'll talk about some things not to say when asking for a raise and then I'll wrap it all up in one final post on the subject.
In the mean time, I want to hear about how you add value to your company as an employee. I'd also like to hear how managers think about added value in their employees. What's the best example you have seen of added value in your career?
photo credit, Karyn Rachtman
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