The final part of the Triple A Plan to protect your career from falling foul of the gender pay gap is to Audit Your Work
Closing the gender pay gap requires a two-pronged approach – at the organisational level and at the individual level.
Closing the gender pay gap at your company or in your sector may take several years however you don’t have to wait for that happen. Instead you can take positive proactive action to protect your personal gender pay gap.
And that’s using my Triple A Plan.
The Triple A Plan to protect your career from the gender pay gap
Earlier this week we explored Part 1 – how to Always ASK For More and Part 2 – how to articulate your ambitions.
Today we’re looking at the third and final part of the Triple A Plan.
AUDIT YOUR WORK
The final piece in the triple-A plan is about auditing the work that you do. What’s important is that when you’re working hard and getting those good results, audit the work that you do and how valuable is that work that you do to the business.
Audit everything that you do and grade it from 1 to 10, where one is the business couldn’t care less about that piece of work or task, to 10, where it’s absolutely critical and has a direct impact on the profitability of the organization.
This will help you evaluate how valuable you and your job role are to your employer.
The statistics tell us that those people doing the work that is of most valuable to the business, are the ones who get the promotions more quickly and the bigger pay rises.
It’s common sense, isn’t it. When you do work that is valued by the business, you are more likely to get seen. You’re more likely to get noticed and therefore, get promoted.
Once you’ve done that audit, it’s time to reflect on what you’ve discovered.
If you’re doing work that’s less than 7 out of 10, what can you do to make sure that you’re getting the opportunity to work with clients or projects that are graded 8, 9 or 10?
It’s too easy sometimes to get caught up in being busy and doing stuff that doesn’t affect the bottom line.
Though sometimes it can be a smart and strategic move to get involved in something a bit different.
For example, many years ago, when I worked at Arthur Andersen (pre Enron scandal!), I volunteered to get involved with organizing the dinner dance for the firm. This project took up an awful lot of time and energy but it was great fun and fantastic. It was a small group of us with representation from several departments across the firm including the managing partner! What a brilliant opportunity to get to know him and be able to prove my worth and articulate my ambitions to him.
If you are offered opportunities to get involved in something different, don’t feel that you’ve got to say yes.
Be strategic and audit the opportunities before you say yes. Then say yes to the ones that you can see will be of value to you in your career or have direct value to the business or that you’re going to have great fun doing.
That concludes my three part series on the Triple A plan for women who want to protect their careers falling foul of the gender pay gap:
- always ask for more
- articulate your ambitions and, finally
- audit the work that you do.
I hope you found part 3 of the Triple A Plan to AUDIT your work helpful so that you can identify whether how much the work you’re doing is valued by your employer.
If you missed parts 1 and 2 of the Triple A Plan to protect your career falling foul of the gender pay gap, check those out here:
- Part 1 – how to Always ASK For More
- Part 2 – how to articulate your ambitions.
And if you prefer to listen than read, check out my Closing The Gender Pay Gap podcast episode on this same topic.
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