Brandon Southern, a former senior leader at Amazon as well as having worked at eBay, and Gamestop said how “Years ago, I was working at a large tech company, and I was speaking with a coworker.
This person had been with the company for six years and he was frustrated about never being promoted. He stated that he put in his time, had been loyal to the company, watched others get promoted after only a few years, and said he deserved a promotion.”
Southern wrote how companies usually want to not just cut costs but whether replacing one employee might be cheaper than assessing the value created by each employee and result in a potential compensation inflation.
This means that other employees also seeing the example of the one employee asking for a raise based on time spent in the company would bring up the same topic wanting their own raise leading to a company having to do much more than just look for a new employee.
He wrote “Also, the company is used to dealing with people quitting and it’s rarely detrimental to the business. But there is a way to receive a raise, and that’s through the creation of value.”
Southern in the article stated that “The easiest way to justify a higher salary is through value creation, not simply by staying with a company for a long period of time.”
Chris Williams, Former HR VP of Microsoft also wrote about how companies these days are not going to reward employees for being loyal to it. He stated “Even when loyalty is recognized, it’s usually personal loyalty, from one individual to another. And with people moving jobs so often, that kind of loyalty rarely endures.”
He added “And don’t expect your company to be sympathetic to your years-long tenure when the layoffs are looming). It’s going to treat you as part of a cold business calculation, a simple exchange of value.”
Further, Andrew Yeung a former Meta and Google employee, in a Business Insider article wrote about how the concept of ‘eat the frog’ helped him get promotions. The concept was essentially him stepping in to do the tasks that were not as glamourous as others and didn’t have many takers.
A study called the “Randstad Workmonitor 2024” also explored how while ambition is certainly there among employees, there is also a growing importance for work-life balance even if it does not mean quick career progression.
As per the study, “work-life balance is even more important (57%) than higher pay (55%). Over a third don’t want career progression because they are happy in their role (39%), and the long-term ambition for most respondents is a stable in-house role.”
Reports also state that around 63% of Indian employees claim that while they want more managerial or leadership roles, however, promotions are not the only aspect they are looking at.
While 56% of Indian workers said “If I find a role I like, I’m happy to stay in it, even if there’s no room to progress or develop” another 68% also claimed that they would think about leaving a job if did not result in any progress.
Similarly, while the global average as per the study stated that around 93% of employees globally ranked work-life balance as high as pay, for Indian workers it is 98%. 63% of Indian employees also, as per the study, state that they would reject a job if it is negatively affecting their work-life balance while on a global scale, the number is 57%
