The Ted & Co. Job Pleasure Index

tedgoudie.com announces the pilot release of its Ted & Co. Job Pleasure Index, which can be used by employees in anecdotal discussions about their job situation. The methodology in this index has been crowdsourced during multiple workday lunches and workday lunch commutes. The model has proved highly relevant throughout extensive betas, which included sidebar gripes, groupthink bitchfests, bonus-check woohoos, petty jealousies, disruptive innovations, milestone celebrations, betting pool wins, and all manner of Tweetering and Facebooking.

The Index utilizes a 10-point scale that an employee cites to represent the current state of their job satisfaction. Each employee’s personal Index changes in real-time based on the events of the day, which can be aggregated into trendline data with colorful graphs, and for the more advanced, charts. Assuming proper use of varied color is used when constructing graphs, visual indication perception is a real possibility, though it will remain out of reach for many.

The scale can be impacted by both short-term factors and events that have a lasting impact. For example, the +1 Index increase earned by a compliment from a co-worker can be erased in minutes by mundane task assignment from a supervisor. On the other hand, if a company moves from shabby converted warehouse space to sleek functional office space, it represents a nearly permanent +1 Index impact for the employees who made the location transition.

The Index

10 – If you win a $300 million lottery, you keep working full-time at your job until retirement. A 10-score does not exist in reality; it is only fleeting and still rare.

9 – If you win the $300 million lottery, you spend at least 5 minutes pondering whether to keep working, but the thought of having a penguin habitat in your own home wins out over working. You like your job and employer so much, however, that you keep working until a replacement can be found and trained. You take your former coworkers out to lunch monthly long after you cease working. You don’t get the irony of your tattoo with the company logo. The 9-score is slightly less rare than the 10-score, but is also at best fleeting in the real world. Short durations of 9-score levels are not unusual for employees who typically rate in the 5-8 range.

8 – “The perfect job.” There is no way you will ever leave this job of your own accord, not for any increase in pay or responsibility at another company. At every midday retirement celebration you attend, you experience a feeling of foreshadowed sentimentality looking ahead to your twenty-years-away retirement, dreading the thought of leaving this workplace. You’re not even sure you have a resume on your computer anywhere. You don’t get the irony in the fact that you named your child after the company. You treated your department’s assigned reading of “Who Moved My Cheese?” as one of the more serious assignments in your career, so you took a deep dive into the material and became a “My Cheese Was Right Here All Along” trainer for the company.

7 – It would be very difficult to get you to listen to offers from another company, let alone leave your current company. You toe 99% of the company line and can’t wait for the gold [plated] watch with the company logo with only 14 more years under your belt. Caesar’s Palace has an over/under prop bet (6) on how many times you’ll say “I love my job” on Facebook or Twitter this year. You oversell the employee experience to friends when discussing work, making you a great recruiter but hurting employee retention overall.

6 – This is a good company to work for, and you’ve got great coworkers and a great boss. You wear company logo apparel outside of work hours, some of which you’ve paid for yourself. Your spouse tells your friends that he loves his job. You feel defensive emotional pain when a coworker complains about the company, which frequently causes you to respond “I’m sorry you feel that way, that has not been my experience at all.”

5 – The baseline score. You’re not actively looking for a new job, but you’re quick to learn about opportunities to improve your worklife. If you get offered a 50% pay increase, you’re gone. You easily identify frustrating aspects of your current company, but keep some of them to yourself. You find parts of the corporate culture hokey, but can understand the basis of such culture and the benefits realized by the company. You updated your resume within the last three months.

4 – You keep a keen eye on the job listings vertical that is popular in your field (Hello, Harry Joiner). You apply to the cherry opportunities and hope for a call, but soon forget that you applied as you stay busy in your current role. You greet even the most beneficial company initiative with the skepticism of Dateline NBC reviewing the course content of a seminar titled How to Write Effective Craigslist Personal Ads. You spend more time reading Indeed alert emails than reading work email.

3 – You’re actively sending resumes to every job that remotely sounds like what you do for a living. You’re applying so often that you are likely applying to some jobs more than once; searching for jobs consumes most of your work hours. That, and playing games on your smartphone. The vast majority of conversations with coworkers are complaint-driven rantfests, though you remain mute when directly asked how the company could improve employee satisfaction or business performance. You ask three people per week for LinkedIn recommendations.

2 – You are going to quit your job today, even if you have no savings and would have to collect unemployment or seek welfare. You openly mock your employer on Twitter with no concern for the consequences, even when you’re slizzered. If the company president were to approach you and ask how the company could improve, you might answer with “Be less stupid” or “Like you care.” You proudly display your tattoo of another company’s logo, and you get the irony.

1 – You are going to quit your job right now, even if you have no savings and cannot collect unemployment or welfare. The lowest job pleasure score. Moving into your parents’ basement sounds better than another day of work, and a sacrifice you are willing to make, even realizing that you only have a three day grace period before your parents realize the mistake of un-emptying the nest and start endlessly encouraging you to “get back out there” and “get back on your feet.”

Implementation

The index is used as a relative measure of job satisfaction, and is typically utilized in sidebar employee-to-employee conversation to effectively communicate each employee’s current state. Forward thinking thoughtful supervisory types can also leverage the Index, engaging subordinates in similar discussion where the appropriate levels of respect and relationship exist. The Index is designed for employees at all levels of education, occupation, and experience. It is assumed that most American workers are familiar with the ordinal numbers one through ten, and the value of each relative to another. For the worker who cannot grasp such concepts, enlightened topics such as job satisfaction are likely of no concern, rendering the Index’s nomenclature system moot.

Contributing Factors

The following list is not exhaustive, but contains many of the factors that can precipitate changes in the Index.

• Telecommuting policy
• Dress code
• Flex time
• Hiring practices
• Employee technology
• Web usage policy
• Lunch meetings
• Jeans Days/Casual Fridays
• Use of agendas in meetings
• Boss personality
• The collective quantity of printing by department
• Availability of parking
• Corporate events
• Office environment
• Snacks
• The availability of lemon-lime soda in the vending machines
• The number of computer mice brought to meetings
• The likelihood of being subpoenaed
• The rate of exposed tattoos
• Instant messaging capabilities
• The percentage of speech taken up by acronyms
• Working with friends
• Humor
• Dirty Humor
• Really Dirty Humor
• Water cooler discussion
• Bonus disbursement
• Raises
• YouTube! videos of giant eagles scooping up babies
• Coworkers wearing Polo cologne
• Adequate meeting space, or a corporate culture suited to the number of meeting rooms

I’m a 5, with a semi-permanent +1 for our new office digs, settling me at 6 today. How about you?