Are you happy with your wage?
High pay doesn’t buy employee loyalty
It’s nearly Christmas and friends and family all over the world are sending me heartfelt greetings. Quite a few are coming in from firms on whose mailing list I must stand, wishing me all the best for 2025, whilst having sent me no work assignments during 2024. I do wonder why they bother. It’s a mailing list, I guess. You’re all on a mailing list, so let me wish you a merry Christmas and a happy 2025. Heartfelt.
I have three occupations in my average day: I work when I can, I write when I feel like it, and I sleep when I must. When there’s nothing to write about, I clean the house. If I feel like it.
My work recently blew up a storm out of what had been more or less five years of on-and-off doldrums. I’m a translator, you see, and translation has been taken over. Welcome to the machines. That means I’ve had to look elsewhere and, apparently, I’m overqualified to care for the mentally disabled. There is a truth in there somewhere: I am overqualified to care.
The storm of work is not in translation, however, it’s in retail grocery. Friends of mine run a shop selling produce that reminds expats in Belgium that there will always be an England. We remind them of that with produce sourced, mostly, in Ireland; and there is a truth in that somewhere, as well.
I have known the George family, who run the business, now in its third generation, for over 15 years. I was friends with a friend of theirs and, one summer evening, I was over at his for a barbecue when Ms George dropped in after walking her dogs.
We are all 15 years older now, and Lou-lou, currently the elder of the dogs, is, so the vets tell us, a full 105 years older. Such is the Abrahamic lifespan of dogs, or at least those with the good fortune to be blessed with Ms George as their owner. Lou-lou is now a little slower, and a little more incontinent, but one thing she is as good at now as she was 15 years ago: loving. There is a truth for us all, somewhere, in there, as well. Because what enables Lou-lou, just as any dog, any animal, to love now as much as she loved back when she was a nipper is her inability to level unwarranted judgment. And that is the greatest truth of all—in there somewhere. And, with that, I’d like to level a judgment, which is why I’m writing this at all.
My creditors will perhaps be dismayed to hear this, apart from those charging me periodic interest on what I owe them, but my new occupation pays me less than I have earned in any capacity since I earned £4 an hour in 1986 working as … a lawyer (the Law Society of Scotland’s recommended minimum salary—warmly embraced by my employer firm of solicitors—was, for the year 1986-1987, £4,000 per annum). Even what I earned in tourism—US$21 a day plus expenses, commissions and gratuities, for a 70-hour week—wasn’t much worse. So, if the pay is that bad, why did I agree to do the work?
Hang on: who said the pay is bad? Tell me, whilst we’re on the subject: what is a bad pay packet? I’ll tell you: a bad pay packet is one that you’re not happy with. That sounds obvious enough. Except it’s not obvious at all, because you’re probably by now off running down the road with disgust at my dwelling to consider such asinine questions: a bad pay packet is one you’re not happy with.
Except that the happiness doesn’t need to be a result of the amount you’re paid. And that is what so many employees, and their employers, miss. If the neoliberals had really been so smart in imposing their less regulation on us from above, more regulation by us downstream model, they would’ve thought about just being nicer to their workers instead of constantly antagonising them and paying them peanuts. Even a monkey is happy with peanuts, but not if you keep poking a stick in its arse. The neoliberals believe every carrot has to have an equal and opposite stick, and they know where they can shove it, as well.
So, why am I so happy, with the pay packet I have (notice, I put the comma in there to give you a step for a hint this time)? I could say it’s because I’m working for friends, but that’s not quite true. Sure, there are quiet moments when Debs and I have a more personal chat but, on the workplace floor, she’s the same with me as with everyone else: firm, knows what she wants, can have a laugh, will admit to not being always right, knows the business, knows her business, and minds her own business once the orders are given. No one backchats, and no one’s unhappy. In short, everyone’s happy, with their pay packet. So it’s not exclusive to me, the happiness factor.
In every workplace, even if there isn’t a full-on Bolshevik revolution in the making, you’ll get snide or catty side comments about him or her, but not here. This firm doesn’t talk itself up as being a family (except the high management obviously are) but instead leads the way by acting as a family. By mucking in when muck needs shifting. By understanding how to accommodate staff with their illnesses, and their needs for time off. No one sits with a stopwatch at breaks. And no one overstays their welcome in the staff room after breaks, either. It’s extraordinary, because in the highest-blown law firms and advisory firms that I have known, the word team denotes what staff members do together. At Stonemanor, it denotes what staff members are together. There is no palpable sense that anyone is out to get at anyone else; at Big 4 accountancy firms, the sense is palpable and visible. And, there, they never cease talking about teams and families. As if talking about them will create them.
I didn’t conduct interviews, but in chatting between times with several people, I’ve learned that I have three colleagues at least who, like me, owned their own business, worked in business consultancy, travelled widely and exported designer goods. Whether it was a pandemic, Brexit, economic downturn or simply bad luck, four, or more, of us have wended our way to the door of an employer who’s prepared to take a chance on people who, in many cases, are more highly qualified than them, but for whom the employment criterion was not qualifications, but whether they cared, something the homes for the disabled sector can’t appreciate.
That’s why I’m happier in this job than in any other job I’ve done my whole life long. Of course, it’s taken a lifetime to appreciate what makes me happy. And the way Stonemanor is run is not in any way to pander to me. It’s to ensure that Stonemanor is a business that all who work for it, if they feel any way like I do, rise every day and look forward to a fresh day of labour, even if the pay isn’t great and even if it could be a gruelling day on your feet.
Those who care for their employer, and those whose employers care about the product, the service, the renown and the reputation of their business all share something that is not neoliberal in its foundation. It is very human. It’s not that qualifications are irrelevant, but knowing you’ve been appreciated for what you did at work during the day can mean every bit as much as the pay packet at the end of the week.
Thank you, Stonemanor. Oh, and merry Christmas.
Good point, Graham. It isn't the paycheck so much as knowing you're doing a good job and that it's appreciated. That buys employee loyalty. I have had a varied career. Prior to marriage I worked in sales, successfully for the time. Then teaching science, then Social Services, in fiscal, eligibility and employment training and finally as a traveling business, computer program analyst and consultant.
The only time I disliked my job, was in Social Services when we acquired a new Chief Accounting Officer (CAO), he thought he was some jim-dandy and looked down on he peons who were mostly high school book keepers. He kept bragging about how he had brought 2 million dollars into the department in his first year. What he did was force the manager to do her job, filing a quarterly report with the State that was two years behind. This particular report was the basis for State funding of the County Department. He called every other week meetings with our department which was a litany of how great he was and how stupid the rest of us were. Until finally I got pissed off so when repeated how he had a Masters Degree in Accounting. I piped up, 'Well I have a Masters degree in physiology and I think that outranks yours in degree of difficulty. Now can we get on with this meeting, I have work to do' Needless to say he blocked every opportunity I had for promotion and tried hard to get me fired. Problem was, in government you need cause to fire someone.