Loyalty to Employer, Efficiency, etc.

There are some of us who think that loyalty to employer is directly proportional to the number of years you work in a particular organization.  However, I have a slightly different take on this.  The mantra is quality and not quantity.  The reality is that your loyalty is measured by your discipline, quality of work, maintaining confidentiality of your organization’s data vis a vis its competitors.  What plays an important role is your ability to keep a tight balance where you do not compromise on the work that you put in, neither do you put in extra hours to compensate for your inefficiencies.

Freshers in any workplace are young, energetic, mostly bachelors, who can work 24 hours at a stretch, totally living out of their offices or going home only to sleep and change clothes and rush back to office.  The most common misconception every fresher has is that by doing overtime, they would earn brownie points from their bosses compared to their older colleagues who have other responsibilities in lift apart from work.  Nothing can be further from the truth.  When we are freshers, we forget that the older colleagues too were once freshers and that we freshers too are going to be older one day and will not retain the same amount of enthusiasm and energy no matter how capable one might be.

Working extra hours can be seen in another way.  Quite often, those staying back to work extra hours are those who have not been able to complete their assigned tasks within time, work at a slower speed than others, and thus stay back to finish what others finished well in time.  For this inefficiency of some people, others who finish their work on time and leave on time are branded as shirkers.

Don’t just work hard, work SMART.  I admit, this is easier said than done and I have also struggled to implement this principle in my own career.  At least, one can try to work towards this goal.