7 red flags to switch jobs

This post is entry for “Write Your Heart Out” #WYHO weekly contest. One of the prompts for this week is “7 signs that it’s time for you to find a new job”

 

A wonderful team, healthy work environment, good manager, peers and subordinates contribute to your professional success. Absence any one or more of the following may hinder your progress and often leads to frustration in your work environment. We need to be vigilant to identify these red flags and make informed decisions to switch jobs/careers.

7 red flags for me would be:

Hostile Work Environment – This may include your partial boss, gossipy colleagues and backstabbers. There may be scenarios where, regardless of how much ever hard work you invest, your boss may be lenient and partial towards others, but, indifferent towards you. He may curb you from taking vacations and expect you to work overtime, but would leniently allow others to take vacations at the ‘drop of the hat’, and also assign them with light workloads. Gossip mongers and backbiters literally create hostile environment at work. With these people around, you never know what is true or false? What to believe and what not to? You also tend to fear about “what stories might be doing its rounds about you”?

Burdened with others’ workload – You may be the only person assigned the work, that is meant to be done by 2 or 3 people. You may work overtime, take work home, login from home, answer emails and texts during vacations, etc. By doing all these, you are working like a donkey and being paid in peanuts. Your good nature and helping nature maybe abused and you feel vulnerable. You will not have any personal life and you have turned into a drone.

No recognition or appreciation – You may put your heart, soul, time, effort and intelligence into research,resurrecting previously existing processes, reverse engineering processes, being a self-learner, thriving without prior documentations or hand-offs,  improving/ automating processes which can cut down man hours and manpower significantly; working over time to complete the mammoth work that is assigned to you. If you have done all these and in the end, your manager acts as if you have just done your job and nothing great, and he fails to either acknowledge or appreciate or recognize your immense hard work and dedication. This attitude of “indifference” puts you off.

No visibility – This is in connection with above point. You do all the hard work, but someone else takes the credit and is selected to present your work to upper management. He gets to travel around the world, gets an opportunity to conduct video conferences and becomes the “go-to” person or “face” for all your priority projects. You strive hard in the background, while he is projected in the foreground.

No pay raise or promotion – Irrespective of how much ever your strive, pay raise and promotions are just elements of “fiction”. You try to persuade your boss by making a spreadsheet of all the projects you have done and how much effort you have put in, but all he does is ‘shoot you down’ with “what could have done better” and still insists that you prove your worth for promotion.

Micromanagement – Your boss is a “micro management freak” who demands every minute details of what you are currently doing, schedule weekly or daily “project update” calls 7 meetings; he walks around your cube on the pretext of talking to others, but in reality is spying  your presence at your cubicle.

No Career Growth – You end up working like machine, doing the same mundane stuff everyday, while others get to work on more interesting, priority and visibility projects.