The Workforce
Our workforce has two areas of concern, the employees, and the employers. Both are equally responsible for the state of our culture, and this is due to our collective lack of empathy and humility.
As an employee we often blame our employers for all our hardships and workplace woes. We dehumanize front desk personnel, management, and the owners. We expect things from them we would never expect out of ourselves.
We come to work, do our duties, and go home, and on pay day we receive our agreed upon compensation. Being an employee is hard, but it pales in comparison to running a business.
As a society we have been taught the world should pay us for what we are worth, that we deserve more, and we are unique and special butterflies that should be coddled and handled with care.
If we want more, we need to ask ourselves why we deserve more
What have we done for the company beyond our role that has contributed to the success of the organization? Seniority means nothing, awards should be earned; we don’t deserve a larger slice of the pie for sitting on a bench longer than someone else.
If we want a raise we must quantify what we do. Are we contributing to the success of the company and how have we specifically done so? Performing a bunch of massages is not a qualifying reason, that is already calculated into our pay. If we work more massage hours we will make more money. We were not solely responsible for all the clients you massaged, so we cannot take credit for their revenue generation. “But I did the massage, if I wasn’t here the client wouldn’t have paid for the service.” We could say that, and we would be right, but we are a part of a team and if the team didn’t do its job, we wouldn’t be able to do ours.
As massage therapists we should be grateful that we have clients provided for us to serve. If the administration didn’t do its job we wouldn’t be able to do ours.
As massage therapists we perform the services, we are the product, but we are not the sole reason the client came to us. It was through the collective hard work of the team. As an industry we need to begin seeing our company as a machine, one that works together to achieve our dreams.
We live in a selfish society that tells us to focus inwardly on how we feel and hurt. What we want is more important than what we might want later. It has twisted our understanding of our value, and we are blind to our actual self-worth. We are told we deserve more. The reality of life is different from what we are told, the truth is we don’t deserve anything more than what we have worked for. We earn what we get; we have to work for our accomplishments, and hard work often isn’t enough. If we want to receive the compensation we believe we deserve we must work for it and provide evidence we deserve it.
