Don’t ever work in a stable job a single day in your life

Fixed Cost

Workers are viewed as a cost for the company. They are a fixed cost that should be reduced in normal times and removed in the form of retrenchment in times of difficulty. They do not recognize employee as a growing asset that will appreciate over time. This assumption is not all wrong as most employees do not improve themselves and only live from day to day. Moreover, most employees do not have the incentive to improve themselves because they get paid for the time spent in routine job. In other words, you don’t get paid immediately for improving, unless you got a promotion. But promotion does not always come as a result of improved productivity as there are other factors such as politics or peer pressure that comes into play.

When you work in a job, the company pays you based on the time you spent in that job. Time is a bad indicator of business effectiveness. This creates the problem of purposely dragging work which involve deliberately reducing work efficiency to gain more money per job-done. By increasing the time spent on each job, workers get paid more for doing less.

So you got a vicious cycle here. Organization pay employee based on time spent. Then, employees do not have the incentive to improve themselves because they will get a stable income whether they improve or not. Besides, workers generally delay their work and are not efficient. Therefore, organization does not treat them as a growing asset that needs to be nurture. Instead, they treat employee as fixed cost. If you are a self-motivated worker who continuously improves yourself, then your capacity as a growing asset is often overlooked by managers who rely on stereotype to categorize employees. In other words, you are considered as lazy and unmotivated as the next employees in the room. This limits your potential if you work in a stable job.

Freedom to leave

Another reason organization treat employees as fixed cost instead of growing asset is that employees have the freedom to leave the organization. Any training and development cost in making the employee more capable will only increase his/her competitive advantage, which can be used as a reason for pay rise. If the company does not comply with the pay rise demanded, they will leave the company and join another company; taking away any value created by the training with them. Therefore, it is not in company’s interest to train employees as these will create high cost of labor supply in the future.

Because training an individual employee can creates threat to the company, company nowadays uses team-based style of completing a project. This does not substantially creates a lot of competitive advantage in a particular employee but sufficient enough to complete the job even with under-trained employees. This type of working style implies that any