Sometimes you can’t really appreciate something until it’s gone, and this applies to companies as well. I can relate an incident when the network engineer of a friend’s company decided to take 2 weeks off in the middle of the work season. Two days into his holiday the server crashed and they had absolutely no internet access.
This was particularly bad because their phone system was built into the network so that went down as well. Having no way to communicate, people had to resort to getting up and actually walking around to talk to people. Also, with no server access to speak of, nobody could access files and documentation that they needed in order to complete their work. Plunged into a communication blackout, the only way they could contact their international head office was through our cell phones.
A lot of companies are stingy in the sense that they would rather set up a single point of failure for an event that has a low likely hood of happening (though can have devastating results if it does happen) rather than hire another person to ensure that it never happens.
Can you relate a similar situation in your company? If you can, then the person you want to aim to be is the person who represents the single point of failure. In essence, you want to put yourself in a position that if they fired you, all hell would break loose.
If putting yourself in such a position is not currently available, it is always possible to create such a position by introducing a piece of software or creating something for your company that overtime becomes necessary for them to function effectively.
By introducing this new product or feature that brings all this benefit to the company (when in actual fact you’re trying to place yourself in a position of more bargaining power) you will achieve two goals:
- 1. You will increase your perceived value by being seen as someone who is proactive and cares about the welfare and success of the company
- 2. You will have more bargaining leverage as you will be the only person who knows how to operate the said software or feature.
You may be thinking that your company could easily hire someone and train the person to replace you in that position if you became too much of a nuisance.
The truth of the matter though is that companies would rather put up with some of the requests of an employee (when the requests have no perceived negative outcome) who they consider valuable and is already familiar with the company than spend the time to hire someone new and train them from scratch.
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
