Being a freelancer has helped distance me from a frustrating
feature of modern work: we have built increasingly sophisticated systems for
measuring employee performance while remaining remarkably primitive at
recognizing employee value.
We have dashboards.
We have metrics.
We have quarterly objectives.
We have calibration meetings.
We have competency frameworks.
We have seventeen different ways to say “good job.”
And somehow the conversation about actually paying someone
appropriately still seems to require the organizational equivalent of a hostage
negotiation.
I realize budgets are complicated.
I realize businesses have constraints.
I realize money doesn't grow on trees.
But neither does expertise.
And unlike money, expertise tends to walk out the door to be
around people who understand that creativity needs oxygen, that good ideas
rarely emerge from exhausted people staring at dashboards, and that human
beings are not software licenses that can simply be reassigned when someone
leaves.
When I asked a friend why she just left a high profile job, her
one line answer perfectly summed up a situation many of us find (or have found)
ourselves in: “I want to remember what it feels like to finish a day without
mentally drafting my resignation letter.”
