October 9, 2012

Effective Employee Performance Appraisals

By D. Ekstrand ¶ Posted in Career ¶ Tagged Career, Motivation

How to assess performance and get results

During my 15+ years in the high tech management world I must have written a stack of performance reviews that was 3 feet high. At one point I remember plopping down a stack of reviews that was 2.5 inches tall on my manager’s desk for his signatures. So I think I know something about performance assessments. Since you are reading this, I assume you want someone’s take on the mechanics of how things should be done in the “real” world, and not a dry primer on how things are done in theory. Good. I’ll start at the beginning.

“Tell me how you are going to measure me, and I’ll tell you how I’m going to behave” - Eliyahu Goldratt

The job description

If you want high performance from your employees, you must tell them what is expected of them. The basic idea is that your employee’s job is to make you look good to your supervisor(s). Unfortunately, you can’t actually write this on any formal document because HR will call you into a conference room, pin you to the floor and spoon hot sauce onto your eyeballs. So you tell your employees this verbally and explain that you’re just joking. But it conveys the point that the employee, should s/he ever be confused about how to behave, is expected to align their efforts to your supervisors priorities. This is why you will hold periodic staff meetings with your employees and blabber about the scuttlebutt going around at the next higher management level. At least, that’s what your employees think. What you are actually doing is communicating to them what your supervisor thinks is important. So if the Big Cheese mentions in her staff meeting something about always seeing too many people milling around the water cooler, you bring it up – half jokingly – in your staff meeting and your people bring it up in their staff meetings. Soon Mora Hydrate, one of your first level employees, knows that she needs to get a drink and get back to work next time she’s thirsty.

Of course you still need to write something about the job expectations for your employees for a couple of reasons. First, you need a yardstick to measure their performance so you have something to beat them over the head with whilst demanding improvements. Second, your reports need to have something to proudly point to and say, “See, I’m in charge of the damn coffee machine!” But it needs to be at an appropriate level for the employee. You can mutter to an experienced employee that they’re in charge of lawn clippings, they’ll understand what you mean, they’ll figure out how to measure their performance and even write their own job description and set goals. But then there’s the laziest employee imaginable, William deSlacker, who will use your written job description to justify doing a lousy job because it makes his life easier.

For example:

What is desired: William maintains the copy machine himself using the manufacturers recommended procedures and rarely does anyone complain about the copier being down.

What you wrote for a job description: “William is responsible for maintaining the copy machine.”

What actually happens: William puts a sign on the copy machine whenever it’s broken that says “Do not use!” Then he calls around town to schedule an emergency visit by a qualified repair person. The office is in an uproar.

Second try: “William is responsible for performing all the manufacturers recommended maintenance and all repair work required to keep the copy machine in working order.”

What actually happens: William complains that people are breaking the copier because they aren’t using it correctly so he moves the copier to his office and limits the use of the copier to certain people who must obtain certification from him. Returning to your office after lunch, you find a “love note” from your boss stuck on the middle of your computer screen. “See me. Now.”

Third try: “William is responsible for ensuring the copier is available for use by all office personnel by performing maintenance and repair of the machine as needed.”

What actually happens: William puts a note on the copier table everyday at 3 pm, “Down for scheduled maintenance”, and takes the copier to his desk to clean out the machine with iso-propyl alcohol for two hours and run diagnostics afterwards. You find the copier on your ergo chair when you arrive the next day. There is an unhappy face drawn on it using a dry-erase marker and a voice mail from your boss waiting for you.

Fourth try: “William is responsible for ensuring that office personnel productivity is not negatively impacted by copier downtime by performing maintenance and repair of the machine as needed in a safe and cost effective manner.”

What actually happens: William, newly aware that office personnel complaints can ding his performance, is somewhat boxed in and is not happy. He complains that you haven’t told him what good performance is. Is it less than 3 complaints per month? Or zero? This is intolerable! You explain to him that you will evaluate each complaint to determine if it was preventable, that continuous improvement is ALWAYS expected, and that he needs to clean off the copier’s unhappy face.

Note that you don’t have to invent and maintain a new monitoring routine; the data comes to you without effort on your part. It is in this manner that you can achieve the prime directive for supervisors in stable organizations that lack the intrinsic motivational driver that comes from fighting just to survive: to keep your reports in a state of constant paranoia about whether their performance is adequate or not. As an added bonus, it relieves you of the difficult task of specifying what level of performance is good and what is bad.

Like all managers, you know good and bad performance when you see it, just don’t ask for the definition beforehand because that would be handing out ammo to the enemy. Too much detail ~~can~~ will be used against you in perverse ways.

For example:

What you wrote: ”William is responsible for ensuring that office personnel productivity is not negatively impacted by copier downtime by performing maintenance and repair of the machine as determined by the manufacturers schedule in a safe and cost effective manner.”

What actually happens: William follows the instructions of the manufacturer to the letter. The manufacturers maintenance schedule is overly aggressive in order to blame all customer problems on inadequate maintenance. So William constantly has the copier in the shop, cleaning it with benzene, because he’s following the manufacturers schedule and methodology. EXACTLY. When you complain that you’re being yelled at in your bosses staff meeting, his defense is that he’s just doing his job as you defined it. As your left eyelid begins to tick involuntarily, he points out that he doesn’t think office productivity is suffering and since you aren’t actually measuring it, what are you gonna do?

So always define a job based on the expected outcome, not the process, unless there is a specific process that actually is the job. Make sure there is someway you can measure performance, even if you don’t have a hard target. And don’t invent a new monitoring process if it requires effort from you. Your job is to get the monkeys off your back and onto your reports, not to add new ones. If a new data collection process is needed to monitor performance, assign the task to someone else. If you do have hard performance targets, like customer returns, or reliability failures, or water usage, etc, well, that’s great.

“He uses the carrot and stick approach with employees. First he beats them with a stick. Then he beat them with a carrot.” – Name withheld by request

Assessing the relative performance of employees

You probably have to (or you should) attend a meeting where you and your manager peers have to pool all of your employees and order them by their value to the organization. Once this is done, their salaries are listed alongside the names. This ordered list is used to prevent as well as detect anomalies, like the top person being underpaid relative to their peers, all the employees of a certain manager are underpaid, or one employee’s performance is dropping relative to their peers, or whatever. Sounds pretty straight forward – until you actually try to do it. Who should go at the top of the list: the person who was lucky to be in a position to make a critical contribution to the organization’s success, or the person who has critical expertise without which the organization would collapse, or the guy who didn’t do much but he saved the organization that one time when he pulled an all-nighter to complete a critical project?

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To illustrate:

Terry and George are junior engineers with similar experience levels. Terry was responsible for reducing the number of nose hairs contaminating the final product, and George was responsible for finding ways to reduce the amount of gold consumed in the manufacturing process. Terry reduced the number of hairs from 43 to 11 ppm, well within the legally allowed limit and better than your competitors, although it will cost the organization roughly $1 million a year in added inspections. But it makes hair related recalls of product, which can cost millions, less likely than they were before. On the other hand, George found a way to save $40 million in gold costs per quarter. George’s supervisor thinks George should be ranked higher than Terry because George is saving the organization over $100 million a year, almost guaranteeing everyone a fat bonus, whereas Terry’s contribution might save the company from an embarrassment someday but will likely have little or even negative impact on the firm’s revenue going forward. Who should be ranked higher?

Solution: There’s no way to tell from the information I’ve given. And I swear, sometimes managers will present exactly this kind of information and ask the group to agree. So, how do you figure this out? There are two things I need to know: what was the level of sophistication required/used to approach the problem, and how well did the employee perform given the constraints on them. George’s money savings doesn’t even factor into it. Sorry George.

Here’s my thought process: Imagine that, instead of a junior engineer, you assigned someone who had the skills to be a top contributor on today’s rank list to the employee’s task. Contrast how this imaginary top contributor might have approached the problem with how it was actually done. It’s the magnitude of the sum of these performance/methodology deltas that I use to determine how far down the rank list each individual belongs as a first pass. So I want to know if Terry set up an efficient system to monitor where nose hairs were contaminating the manufacturing process, recruit the best people to work with him, determine possible root causes using a process to expand the search space for non obvious causes, systematically address the possibilities, leave in place a monitoring system, negotiate with suppliers to do their own final inspections, document his findings, etc? Does his solution ensure that the problem doesn’t reappear in the future after all the personnel familiar with the issue are gone? What level of coaching was required by the supervisor – minimal or constant hand holding? Did he seek out the advice of the appropriate experts? Sometimes an obvious solution is apparent after only a little investigation – a top contributor would put in a quick fix and move on to another task. A lower level contributor might miss an easy solution and burn lots of calories unnecessarily.

If you come up with a list of attributes your imaginary top contributor might have beforehand, either by yourself or with your staff, things will go a lot smoother. One issue that is sure to come up is how do you determine the magnitude of each delta? I go by how long it will reasonably take to correct the deficiency, not by the effect of the delta on the contribution. If this doesn’t make sense to you, imagine you are have spent two years developing a product and right before introduction the lawyers, whom no one has ever heard from, get wind of it and nix it because of some pending litigation. The only correction you have to make for your next project is to add legal to the list of possible stakeholders to check with early on in the project. Meanwhile, your peers have completed their wimpy projects unopposed by legal and are getting promotions, but you get a cost of living raise. Does this make sense?

Many senior contributors perform services for their organizations that aren’t directly related to their responsibilities. They might be expected to perform at a high level on a range of different tasks. Is Terry a hair defect specialist, with few skills outside his bailiwick? Do others seek out his wide range of expertise and advice and does he spend time coaching them? Does he role model your organizations values?

Typically, you shouldn’t rely on the supervisor’s opinion of their employee’s skill level. Supers are biased, normally for the employee, although sometimes not. Sometimes an employee’s poor performance reflects poorly on the manager. Think of an employee who basically didn’t do anything for six months and the supervisor never suggests to them that this might be a problem prior to formal performance appraisal time. So to ascertain where each employee ranks you will have to ask to-the-point questions to the supervisor as if cross-examining a witness for the defense. In other words, don’t ask for the supervisors opinion of the level of supervision required by an employee, ask them how much supervision the employee actually received.

The second factor to consider is what cards the contributor was dealt. Joe, a senior contributor, has his area of responsibility running smoothly due to his efforts over the past few years. His peers have been working overtime attacking and resolving complex problems in their areas. Do you ding Joe for not working as hard as the others? Jess just moved into her position a year ago. Her experience is in a much different area and she is still learning the ropes. Before she was on the top of the contribution list. This year her contributions are much lower. Allen has had a series of serious medical issues over the past year. His contributions were weak. For all the above situations, my experience is that you should probably neither ding them nor reward them. Place them at roughly the same level that they were at in the past. The issues here are not addressed by using pay to motivate performance. Joe needs to given more responsibility, Jess needs a reasonable time frame to ramp up, and Allen may need to be moved from his position to “Special Projects” where the workload can vary with his health until his issues work themselves out.

What about the salaried guy who chooses to work 16 hours a day including weekends? (I personally shared a cubicle with someone who worked from 9 am until 1 am everyday). In general, I’d say that if someone has desirable skills or attributes beyond what you would expect from your imaginary top contributor, then give them a positive delta which can be used to offset their negative deltas. In this particular case, I’d give a positive delta if their output was outstanding, and I’d make sure that this person was fed more responsibilities and that they received some coaching on any skills they needed in order to advance. As much as I hate to admit it, the fastest way to advance up the corporate ladder is to have a high skill level combined with massive hours.

Finally, when it comes time to deal with poor performance issues, like deciding to give a zero raise or a demotion, be aware that fatigue makes decisions more harsh. Take a break first.

“Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright” - Ben Franklin

Goal setting

The hard parts are over. You’ve given your employee a job description and you’ve given them feedback as far as roughly where they stand performance wise. Now you need to point them to areas they need to work on in order to advance up the ordered list and to help them set goals for the upcoming year. The areas to work on are easy – they are the deltas we discussed earlier. Just present them to the employee as opportunities to improve, not as dings used against them.

Now, with respect to goals, understand that intrinsic goals are better than extrinsic ones. In other words, I’m likely to be more motivated to do something if I’m excited about doing it in the first place than if my boss tells me I have to do it. Hell, every 5 year old knows this. Best case, you find out what your employee wants to work on and you combine it with the organization’s business requirements and, viola, goal identified! This is easier than it sounds because organization needs are almost always weighted higher. You need Sally to ramp up marketing efforts for a new product, and she wants to lead a task force. Fine. Combine the two. A task force to ramp up marketing efforts is hers.

Now your employee skips down the hall whistling to herself, expecting to lead a life of work related fulfillment, right? Nope. You need to add nine more items to her number one priority list. Okay, I’m half joking. But having an excess of priorities is a good thing: it ensures alignment with your priorities, it may reduce a subtle form of discrimination where certain classes of people (women, for example) aren’t pushed as hard as others, and nothing is more inefficient than having an employee without enough to do.

Is having too many top priorities abusive? Hey, people volunteer for special forces school in the military, where they are pushed until they puke and beg for more. Just remember that they are closely monitored by the instructors and they feel that there’s something in it for them – a deeply intrinsic reward. Your employees will never achieve the level of motivation of special forces trainees – just do what you can to weave as much intrinsic reward into each person’s priorities and watch for and address stress issues immediately.

November 22, 2011

How to Start a Small Business with a High Probability of Success

By D. Ekstrand ¶ Posted in Career ¶ Tagged Career, Small business

Why you should start your dream business at home and grow it before you quit your day job

The motivation to be an entrepreneur doesn’t make economic sense. Entrepreneurs tend to make less money, work longer hours, and are more stressed compared to employees. They also tend to fail. One study found that, across all sectors, only 66% of new businesses were still in existence 2 years after their birth, and only 44% were still in existence 4 years after. The largest drop in surviving businesses occurs within the first six months, when 13% of establishments are no longer operating. [1]

Why so many failures? Perhaps it’s because there are so many ways entrepreneurs can make mistakes. (I have intimate knowledge of a few). Some examples: [2]

Pursuing an non-viable business concept
Lack of demand or an unrealistic forecast of demand
No business plan
Lack of perseverance
Overspending
Poor marketing
Lack of discipline

Still, lots of people have been very successful and happy as entrepreneurs. It has been widely reported that entrepreneurs, on average, would rather stay independent than take double the pay to work for someone else. [3] Entrepreneurs also have a lot of control over their jobs compared to employees: they can choose what to work on, who to work with, and they can’t be fired by an unfriendly boss. [4]

Characteristics of successful entrepreneurs

It’s difficult to tease out what characteristics are needed to be a successful entrepreneur. The reason for this is that most research is only on the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and this obviously has a survivor bias. What you want to know is what separates successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurs. For example, we know that typically entrepreneurs have college degrees, are married, are 40+ years old with significant industry experience and are motivated by money. We could try to emulate some of these characteristics, thinking it would increase our chances of being successful, but, for all we know, unsuccessful entrepreneurs might have exactly the same characteristics. [5]

Lacking published research or a database to play with, I made a list of some of the small business owners, primarily co-workers, whom I have known in the last decade or so, where I know the situation pretty well:

An electrical engineer I worked with who wrote a software application for ham radio enthusiasts in his after work time. When he was making as much from his software as he was from his work salary, he quit and moved to Florida.
A former engineer and his wife who buy distressed small businesses, turn them around, and resell them after a year of two. This is their primary source of income.
A scientist who runs two small businesses after work and on the weekends. Basically, he invents things, builds prototypes and then contracts out marketing and manufacturing.
A former professor and real estate agent who buys commercial real estate and leases the space out to small businesses.
A former lawyer who worked at a firm that developed software for legal applications. When he was making good money doing contract work in his after work hours, he quit and went to work on his own.
A computer technician at work who quit and started his own mobile computer repair service.
The wife of a co-worker who makes glass beads and sells them on Ebay.
An accountant who started an internet service for schools.
A former manager who started a consulting business.

You may have a similar list. If so, add it to the list above and see if you still agree with my findings. It seems that an awful lot of people are successful, and they do a wide variety of things. The common characteristics of the entrepreneurs that I know are that they really like what they do, they have persevered in rough times, and that they build their businesses up from modest beginnings. These characteristics seem to be consistent with larger surveys [4]. I find it interesting that none of them relied on their business as their sole source of income in the beginning. (This seems to be the opposite of start-up stories on the internet, but this could be due to a publication bias – the most spectacular successes make the most interesting reads.) Also, the businesses themselves are quite diverse. Some of the business models require lots of attention; others require little attention once they get going. Most were an extension of day jobs, and the rest were thought up from scratch by the entrepreneur.

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The low risk method

If we were to rely only on the existing published data, we might conclude that being an entrepreneur is akin to gambling, and should be avoided. But it seems that that there is a way to increase the odds of success. By starting a business on a small scale, with an minimum of capital, and while holding another job as an employee, we lower our risk significantly by giving ourselves a large buffer for making mistakes. If we decide we don’t like running the new business, or we make a major blunder like having a non-viable business model, we can quietly fold and still have a regular cash flow from our day job. This keeps the stress low, the workload reasonable, and reduces the increased possibility of burn-out or depression inherent to high stress situations. [6] If there comes a time that our business is successful enough to support us, then we can quit our day job and become a full time entrepreneur.

Keep it simple

A business can be as simple as writing short stories and self-publishing them, walking dogs, selling baby clothes online or doing tax returns on weekends. Only one of the businesses in the above list leases office space. This is not unusual, overall, more than half of all small businesses are home based. [7] An office might be something like a computer in the laundry room, some storage racks in a corner of the garage, or a kiln in the backyard. If we decide or have to fold, we don’t need to worry about sub-leasing, canceling our utilities, insurance, mail forwarding, etc. I would think small at first; there’s a lot to learn and the smaller the business, the fewer things there are to go wrong, the less money there is to lose.

I would choose my business to suit its most important asset: me. I suspect if this is done right, a job should be like a hobby; something you enjoy. All of the people involved in the businesses above are enthusiastic about their creations. It has been said that the key to being a happy entrepreneur is to not become a slave to your business [4], so I wouldn’t get involved in something that prevents me from taking a vacation once in a while or requires me to answer the phone at all hours.

Look for obvious opportunities, not just big innovations

So how do you come up with a good business idea? If you are lucky there are problems that people already come to you to solve. That’s how many of the businesses above got started.

Most of the owners of the businesses described above are doing something that is related to their former or current career or a hobby of theirs. That’s probably the safest way to go. Although one of the owners above invents things, most of the others have pretty common business models: making beads, fixing things, leasing space, etc. Recent research suggests that expert entrepreneurs are much more likely to prefer generating their own markets versus capturing a niche within an existing market [8], but only a couple of my example businesses seem to be innovative. Perhaps the difference is just semantics. I am using the terms entrepreneur and small business owner interchangeably, whereas others see entrepreneurs as people who generate businesses from new and revolutionary ideas and small business owners are everyone else. [9]

What if you don’t have a good business idea? Then you’re going to have to do what entrepreneurs do: be constantly on the lookout for profitable ideas and working through a checklist.

Is the problem solvable?
Do I have the skills necessary or can I get help from someone who does.
Is there a market?
Can I make sufficient profit?
What are the possible downsides?
Competitors?
What’s the most I could lose?
Am I passionate about it?

Some sources of information/inspiration:

Keep a running list of unsolved problems at work and home.
Google search
Google trends
Google insights for search
Look at craigslist “gigs” for the type of problems people are looking for help with.
Look at the best selling items on Amazon.
Check out the completed auctions on Ebay to see what’s selling.
Facebook ads
Newspaper and magazine classified ads
Look for low rated products on Amazon that are nevertheless selling. Can you improve on them?
Ask people for ideas.

The more you do this, the more ideas you’ll generate and the better the best ideas will be. Here’s a recent video of one entrepreneur discussing his approach:

When you come across a potential idea, don’t automatically reject it just because it seems stupid at first glance – there might be a lot of money in it because everyone else who thought of it has rejected the idea. If you haven’t already, go to bizbuysell.com and look at some of the businesses for sale. Some of them seem ridiculous until you see how much money they are bringing in.

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Seize opportunities

A trait of many of these successful entrepreneurs is that they recognized an opportunity when they saw it and they worked hard to exploit it. This seems to be consistent with research findings. [10] It suggests that you should be open to opportunities that you didn’t see coming. If someone has a successful business model and offers to show how they did it, are you open to jumping on it? [11]

Be patient

Once you find something that suits you, I would plan to be at it for quite a while. It can take years to build up enough business to keep busy full time. Will you be able to continue when you are asking yourself why are you wasting your time when you could be pursing that other idea? If you choose your business such that you enjoy it, I suspect you will have a much easier time and you are more likely to be successful.

Related

Effectual Action Research Community (hat tip to kevinpuj on reddit)
Research on Small Businesses

References

[1] A. Knaup (2004) “Characteristics of Survival: Longevity of Business Establishments in the Business Employment Dynamics Data.”

[2] M. Michalowicz (2011), “The 10 Biggest Mistakes Made by Small Business Owners”

[3] The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By, S. Shane, Yale University Press (2010)

[4] K. E. Klein (1999), “Are Entrepreneurs Happier Than Wage Slaves?”

[5] V. Wadhwa, et al (2009), “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation”

[6] F. Kamer, U CAN’T HAZ SADZ: The Hushed Dangers of Startup Depression, betabeat.com

[7] U.S. Small Business Administration FAQ

[8] N. Dew, S. Read, S. Sarasvathy, R. Wiltbank (2010), “On the entrepreneurial genesis of new markets: effectual transformations versus causal search and selection.” [pdf]

[9] K. Spors, Why Small-Business Owners Aren’t Always Entrepreneurs, Wall Street Journal Blogs, Sept. 9, 2008

[10] “Introduction for Entrepreneurs“, Society for Effectual Action Research Community

[11] T. Ferriss, How to Create a Million Dollar Business this Weekend, The Four Hour Workweek Blog, Sept. 2011

November 16, 2011

Help with choosing a career

By D. Ekstrand ¶ Posted in Career ¶ Tagged Career

Not sure what to major in? Here’s one way to make that decision

In a perfect world, each of us would have a calling.

Let’s say our calling is medical mycology, the study of fungi that cause disease. We don’t just perform medical mycology work; we identify ourselves as a medical mycologist. We read mycology journals at home because we want to. We go to work not because we need cash to pay the bills but because our research gives our life meaning. We love performing the activities that medical mycologist’s perform in the environment that they work in, we have the respect of our fellow humans, we have a challenging but not overly large workload, we have control over what we study, we’re not getting rich but we make good money, we work with like-minded people that we like, and a strong sense that what we do will make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Maybe choosing a career is as simple as deciding what our calling is. Let’s say you dig deep into your preferences and desires and you figure out what your calling is and you decide to major in tea tasting. Now you’re a senior in college and starting to look for a job and you discover the following minor issues:

You live in Oregon and want to stay in Oregon or Washington, but most of the jobs are in Arkansas.
The majority of the tasters surveyed report that they are overworked and underpaid. Many report being forced to do unsavory things to further their organizations goals.
The unemployment rate within tea tasting is 20% and the salaries are low and headed lower.
Tea tasting can be done far cheaper if outsourced to China and some organizations are doing this already.
There’s no career path beyond tasting supervisor.
Starting jobs require an advanced degree and a 3.8/4.0 GPA just to interview.

And there could be more issues, but you get the point. Not to mention that if you can’t determine what your calling is, you are basically nowhere. Perhaps this method of choosing a career is the reason why over 60% of college seniors seriously doubt that they picked the right major? [1]

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I advocate a pragmatic approach. This will rub some people the wrong way if they feel you should “follow your passion”. To some extent, I feel the same way. If you know you are absolutely passionate about nursing or art history or whatever, then just do it. [1] You don’t need to read any further. My experience, though, is that most people didn’t have a clue about what they were passionate about when they entered college or they weren’t passionate about anything and they picked their major on a whim. The other observation I have is that (and there is very limited research on this so I can’t back it up) for careers with similar autonomy, social status, pay, etc, your particular career is probably less of a predicting factor of your job satisfaction than who your employer is and whether you have a good friend where you work. On the other hand, to get good at something, you need to at least like what you are doing, so don’t choose a career in something you are neutral or negative about.

If you want to be an actor or musician, the basic framework might apply, but my approach is probably more business, science and technology career centric. It’s based on your preferences, which can be codified, on data from surveys of employees about their jobs and about their employers, on what jobs are actually available [2], and on occupational outlook data from the government.

What are your strengths and preferences?

You need to understand what your preferences are so you aren’t swimming against the current and burning yourself out needlessly. For example, if you tend toward being introverted, a job where you have to interact with people all day may be exhausting and you may feel that you can’t get anything done because of all the dang interruptions. On the other hand, if you tend toward extraversion, the same situation would be stimulating. Similarly, if you feel the right way to make decisions is by collecting and analyzing a lot of information, then a job where you have to make a lot of quick decisions based on very limited data may be exasperating to you. You might feel that you’re always operating by the seat of your pants, but someone else with different preferences might find it “exciting”. What I’m leading up to is getting you to assess your personality type. I’m thinking of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® in particular [3], but there are other alternatives; many are free on the web or you can find a book in the library to help you. Once you acknowledge your preferences, you can steer clear of positions that would rub you the wrong way. I should make it clear that preferences can and do change over time. You might be an introvert who loves swimming in data now, but later on you might find technical sales or management more stimulating.

What are the most satisfying jobs?

In thinking about what types of jobs are the most satisfying, many people think in terms of job motivation and, hence, the self-determination theory of motivation (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness). I’m not sure how useful this model is. For example, it predicts that highly competent individuals should be relatively happy, yet in the corporate world, these people tend to be promoted into more challenging positions until they reach a level where they aren’t highly competent. Should they avoid promotions to increase their happiness?

In my experience, the negative of the burnout factors (from the Maslach Burnout Inventory [4]) are a better predictor of job satisfaction:

Your workload is reasonable and you have the tools and skills necessary to perform the work.
You have control or autonomy over what you do. For example, you aren’t accountable for something that you don’t have control over and you aren’t inappropriately managed.
You get adequate pay, recognition, performance feedback, and access to development opportunities.
You work in an environment where you aren’t isolated, treated disrespectfully or in frequent conflict.
You are treated fairly along with the other employees.
The work is consistent with your values and ethics and you don’t feel it’s meaningless.

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If you look at a survey of the most satisfying jobs (here’s an example), the most satisfying jobs appear to be held by singers, firefighters, professors, teachers, therapists, and clergy. The common thread in these jobs, when I think about it, is that they intrinsically have the ingredients necessary for a satisfying job. For example, how many professors are micromanaged and have no control over their research? At the other end of the spectrum are clerks, fast food employees, maids and telemarketers. These jobs can lack two or more ingredients. Clerks, for example, may have little control over their workload, little autonomy, low pay, low performance feedback, are isolated, etc. Most jobs, however, appear to be in the middle: to a large extent your immediate supervisor and your organization’s culture determine your workload, pay, feedback, degree of autonomy, etc., rather than the particular position you hold.

Who are the best employers?

In my experience, organizations are on a continuum between mostly healthy down to mostly unhealthy as a whole, probably because of organization wide factors such as pay level versus industry average, job security guarantees, paid time off policies, internal job markets, union status, hiring practices (do they hire people who are fun to work with or are hiring decisions based solely on technical skills?), etc. [5] So, how can you tell if an organization is healthy? If you know or can find someone on the inside that you trust, I would ask them. Otherwise, you can try, for example, glassdoor.com, careerbliss.com and jobatorial.com, to see what employees say about their companies. I would make up a list of 10 or so organizations that I would consider working at which have good reviews, which interview at your college or which you know hire graduates of your school, and which are in desirable locations to you.

Why the focus on organizations that interview at your college? Because many organizations target certain schools, and if you’re not from one of these, it’s possible that you may have little chance of being hired by them. Hiring managers tend to look for employees who are like themselves. If they went to Jimmy’s College for Average Students, they are more likely to hire students from that school (and therefore have interview slots there), and perhaps even scoff at candidates from more selective schools for having an education that was too “abstract” or “theoretical”. Likewise, hiring managers who graduated from elite schools tend to consider admission to an elite school as a screen for the most intelligent employees. [6] This doesn’t mean you can’t consider organizations that don’t visit your school, but I wouldn’t weigh them too heavily on my short list.

If you are willing to move anywhere, you may have to consider the cost of living at the different locations depending on your starting salary. You could be buying a nice condo in Las Vegas for the cost of renting a depressing apartment in some other places. You should also look at which organizations will pay you to further your education if that’s a priority, what they contribute to your retirement fund, and how many vacation days you get, and anything else that’s important to you.

Putting it all together

Now look at what jobs these 10 or so organizations are hiring for and what majors they will consider. What are the starting salaries? Are there minimum GPA cutoffs? Make a list of the various jobs that seem acceptable and look them up in the occupational outlook handbook. [7] Look for any red flags. Is the employment outlook worsening? Does the typical person in this occupation work 60 hours per week? Does it fit your personal preferences? Can you see yourself being happy in this job?

At this point, you probably have enough information to narrow things down and at least you know that any of your shortlist choices is very likely to be a good one. Let’s say your list looks like this: accounting, physics, mathematics, and geology. Personal preferences take over now, but be careful not to romanticize. Geology might involve travel to exotic locales to sample for natural resources, but these locales might be hot and full of biting flies. Mathematics might mean a job in a really fun company in San Diego but the commute to reasonably priced housing is long. It might be reasonable to stall: you could pursue a degree in physics because there are a wide variety of jobs available to physics majors, you want to have enough free elective units to complete pre-med school classes, and you could easily switch to electrical engineering as a junior if you wanted to. Whatever. If you’re still undecided, make a plan to get the information you need, and have a deadline for when you will commit.

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References

[1] Rockport Institute

[2] C. Rampell (2010), Many With New College Degree Find the Job Market Humbling

[3] The Meyers & Briggs Foundation

[4] Maslach, C., Jackson, S.E, & Leiter, M.P., The Maslach Burnout Inventory Manual, Consulting Psychologists Press, 1996

[5] A. Bryson, L. Cappellari & C. Lucifora, Job Satisfaction and Employer Behaviour, Policy Studies Institute, Research Discussion Paper 22

[6] B. Caplan, How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story

[7] United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook