6 workplace value adds that aren’t your salary
Welcome back to Nice Work. We’re still inside our Money May theme, and together we’ve explored the connection between our inherent worth and our financial value, tips for enforcing your rate as a freelancer, and some hard truths about how employers think about your salary.
Today’s edition is a little different. We’re not really talking about money at all.
The saying goes, Money can’t buy you happiness. I’ve been thinking a lot about what amount of money it would take for me to feel stable, comfortable, or absolutely abundant. Though I can definitely spit out a number, I’m wise enough to know that without walking through the park of my values, all the money in the world couldn’t save me from feeling perpetually discontent.
So, dollar signs aside, let’s get the wheels turning on what we might need to receive and have the opportunity to give in our work environment, that will lead us to a more satisfactory exchange of value.
Pause reading for a moment, and let yourself drop into what your dream work environment might be like. How do you feel about your relationship to your work? What exactly does respect from others mean and look like to you? Do you have relationships with your peers? Do you work independently or with a team to create something great together? When do you log on? When do you clock out?
Below is a distilled list of things that can make or break a sense of alignment in the workplace. They may not all be valuable to you, though I bet some of them are. As you read and consider each of them, let it be a reminder that these things have just as much power to support you as your salary does.
Time
Knees deep in the New Orleans-based new season (7) of Queer Eye, I’m fresh off episode 5, where the hero of the episode, Deli Dan, and his curmudgeon-like exterior explores how the long hours at his beloved deli and market has his loved ones one step out the door of his life. Deli Dan basically lives at work. In an inspiring moment, towards the end of his week with the Fab 5, he realizes that he uses work as a type of painkiller. At work, he knows what to do in any situation. At work, he doesn’t have to face the brand-new and scary things happening in his life, like his first long-term, committed relationship.
This got me thinking, even for those of us who have built a business around a passion and really love the work we do, is it sustainable and fulfilling to spend ALL of our time in it? And is spending too much of our time in our work a way for us to avoid other vital, valuable parts of our lives? Food for thought.
On the other hand, I can bet there’s a pretty big pool of us working in order to support the rest of our lives. In this case, ending up at a job where the expectation to work such long hours that the rest of our life disappears can be borderline devastating. You’re not alone or wrong for wanting to do your 9-5 (or even less) and skip on out of there to the more valuable parts of your life. There are workplaces and employers that know this value and help create the environment for it. But sometimes you’ve gotta set the example. If you need help with that, our post on boundary setting might do the trick.
