For a long time I have been under the impression that bringing home a salary at the end of the month is what I can get out of a job. It is also customary to express money earned per year as compensation. It was not until one of my friends in HR explained to me the difference between compensation and salary and I should always look whether I am being compensated or not.
How do I know if I am adequately compensated? The workplace must compensate us for what we are doing at the office so that we don’t regret not pursuing hobbies or holidays. Salary enables us to take care of all the basic necessities in day to day life. If we are just salaried and not compensated, we may end up not having a balance between work and life. Adequate compensation takes into account working hours, long term benefits (including health and wellness), salary, brand, peers and many more parameters. Over the course of the time our priorities change, so do our needs on parts of the compensation; we should keep in mind not to be misled by just tracking one of the parameters of the compensation.
A Qantas flight from Singapore to Perth did some uncommanded moves that injured people on board and put the aircraft at the risk of crashing. The skilled pilots gained control of the aircraft and landed it safely. Investigation reports stated that, the sensors fed wrong data to the aircraft’s computer and it triggered a panic reaction to do course correction. There was a long two minute delay when the aircraft behaved erratically and when the pilots assumed control overriding the computer. There was a delay because, the pilots were confused why the plane makes these moves when the visual feedback from the cockpit window is perfectly fine; this made jump them through a series of quick recollection of what to do in this situation and after two minutes they disengage the auto pilot. The altitude was very high and hence there was enough time to recover, that 120 seconds did not matter much. If the aircraft had been flying lower, it would have crashed.
Feedback is essential part of any workplace. It is necessary to be 360 degrees as it conveys key information about the environment to an individual. In many organizations it is part and parcel of the workplace culture. When feedback is helpful, acting blindly on it might not provide good results to us. There will be an influence of personality clashes, perceptions, prejudices. Receiving those feedback will leave us in a situation where we observe a disturbing dissonance; just like how the pilots were thinking that the aircraft is flying fine as per their visual feedback but the sensors feed in wrong data. Panic reactions or worries about career path arises a lot when feedback is received as a part of the performance appraisal. In those situations it is necessary to take all the data with a pinch of salt and plan the next steps with a long term goal in mind taking into account of all the priorities. A knee jerk reaction to correct oneself will often result in short term gains and might not be aligned with the individual needs and priorities.
The disconnect in an uncommanded maneuver in career will be quite disturbing. Through a healthy cycle of feedback and introspection such situations can be avoided. Dissonance is what causes unexpected outcomes and wrong perceptions, we should learn to remove it off our radar.
Maintaining an inventory will always cost money. Millions of wealth is spent in optimizing supply chain and some have earned billions by cutting down warehouses or having zero inventory policies. New technologies, online presence, faster shipping has made people make more money by optimizing their supply chain. In my school days owning a knowledge bank like encylopedia, tell me why, how stuff works were considered to be prestigious. The advantage of large inventory of knowledge was very evident in General Knowledge exams and quiz competitions. School curriculum also relied on the application of knowledge especially in mathematics, physics and chemistry. All those days, I was relying largely on access to printed books with little or no exposure to computers. My dad’s workplace (manufacturing and engineering) also had a similar environment with little access to knowledge when immediately needed.
Technology for sure evolves at an exponential pace. In two decades internet and communication technologies has revolutionized data access such that a great amount of knowledge is available at finger tips. Does this make our process of learning and keeping ourselves up to date an expensive time consuming activity? If knowledge is available in a handheld device at any time, is it worth going through lengthy college courses for performing day to day technical jobs?
Knowledge is a basis for a thorough understanding of the fundamentals. A strong foundation of fundamentals is a prerequisite for great productivity. The more the understanding, the more is the creativity. The ability to deal with higher levels of abstraction also increases which in turn helps to deal better with our limited working memory (refer to Miller’s law). Access to knowledge/information is a boon to us to increase our ability to learn more, not just to help us remember less. Let us keep learning everyday.
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