What Do You Get Paid To Do?

Once again, Skully is perversely thankful for the opportunity to enjoy a work environment in which he gets paid to be entertained. Big, long meeting. Not sure of the purpose... even less sure of the outcome. "Next steps and action items"... forget about it. All sorts of ambiguous ramblings about "accountability", "teams", "productivity", "organizational development", "culture", "empowerment", blah, blah, blah. For my part, I felt compelled to throw in the concept of, "value add". Figured that one more term that no one could clearly define could only add to the obscurity of the point of the meeting. Anyhoo... one big point kept coming up - everybody wanted "accountability" from the rank and file (yes, this was a managers meeting) but no one could really answer the most basic question for each of the positions. The question is, "What do you get paid to do". Hundreds of minutes on the topic of job descriptions and performance reviews but nobody could boil it down to, "what does the person in this role get paid to do".

Why is that so difficult to answer? Because management wants "productivity"... "part per hour"... "quality ratings"... oh, and they need to interact well with the rest of the kiddies in the sandbox. Of course, they also need to be able to "do whatever it takes to (fill in the blank). I know, Skully isn't all that lucid right now... BUT - HE knows what he gets paid to do. He gets paid to be entertained.

In all seriousness, Skully is starting a new revolution. A revolution that says, "If you don't know what (and precisely what) you get paid to do - and more importantly - if your boss can't articulate what you get paid to do in a single sentence, then just quit going in to work. There really isn't any point. You might as well just have the check forwarded to your house and stay at home. If they can't tell you what you get paid to do, then they must not really know. And if they don't know, then what's the point of showing up.