Your job compensation is much more than just your pay. Although your pay is crucial, there are other areas that are arguably more important. Let’s break it down into different buckets: financial, growth, psychological, social and freedom.
Financial compensation is the amount you get paid — your base salary as well as any bonuses or equity you receive too. This includes any added benefits too, like insurance, pension plans and paid time off.
Growth compensation is how much your position improves your skills, develops useful experiences for you, challenges you and develops your career. Self-improvement can be from learning on the job, learning from colleagues, getting promotions or from attending conferences and courses.
Psychological compensation is about how happy you are with your company and job. Get a pulse of this by asking yourself these questions: How much do you feel what you do matters? How aligned are you with your company mission? How much job security do you have? How supported do you feel by your manager and your colleagues?
Social compensation affects your relationship with others and how they see you. It starts with your job title, your company and its prestige — unfortunately many people place too much emphasis on these factors. A very important factor is the network of people you’re exposed to in your job, which affects your growth as well as your personal and professional relationships.
Freedom compensation is the level of autonomy you have in your job, the amount of time demanded from your job and the flexibility to control your work hours or location. Flexibility to control your location is particularly interesting because although people mostly worked from home during the pandemic, there’s an increasing trend of companies wanting employees to return to their offices.
What do you optimise for?
Give each area a rating out of 5 and see how they score relatively to each other. Since we have unique backgrounds and experiences, we would prioritise these areas differently to each other. It’s totally normal and expected for priorities to shift over time due to personal circumstances, preferences and desires.
I find it incredibly helpful to reflect on how satisfied I am in each of these areas and figure out what needs to change (if anything) to be at the level I want.
Try it out and let me know your thoughts.