To ask how much work you actually and honestly do if you’re highly paid? I am worrying!

[workworkbaby]

I’m on 58k. I know it’s not huuuge money, but it’s decent. Honestly, I do very little. I worry all the time about job security and have mentioned to managers I have capacity to do more etc. Sometimes more will land and other times not. As I work largely from home I often find myself just hanging around. I wonder if this is common? I have a toddler in nursery so I can collect them early sometimes which I love so I’m not complaining but I do worry… anyone else?

To add..... I would not be able to get my head around being paid twice as much, always on and five hrs a week work. I wouldn't feel like I was earning my crust, I want to be useful, and my knowledge and skills to be utilised effectively. What you describe would feel good for a while but I wouldn't feel lost and without much purpose, so I suppose it depends on your working style, working background and your overall progression to that point for perspective on your post.

@Cel77 Manage the handling of two specific pieces of legislation. It has to be done and it needs a specialist

I'm on 50k (operations, sales/marketing) now and find the more i get paid the less i do 🤷‍♀️ having always been a min wage grafter it took some getting used to. Tbh i am looking forward to going back to the kind of work that keeps you busy for a shift when i can take my foot off the gas financially as i do get very bored.

Worked full time at £160k with benefits (private health insurance, company car, childcare) and worked at 10% capacity. Very light workload and very flexible. Am able to go back when kids are older, I imagine salary would rise by then.

I'm in the health sector, senior level. I earn same as OP and work well below the hours I'm paid for. I get the job done to a standard my boss is happy with. 🤷‍♀️

Ok, I'm a teacher on a £35000 salary and feel as if I'm digging my own grave... How does that work?

Yes to all of this.

I certainly didn't walk into my job - several university degrees and a lot of blood sweat and tears, including working extremely long hours, went into me climbing the ladder to where I am now.

Minimum wage and broken from the work. Used to earn 35k euro and did it comfortably but didn’t have kids and now have 4 so that might be something to do with tiredness, soreness etc

I understand what you mean OP, especially with regards to job security - like will your boss one day think “Hang on, what does workworkbaby actually do? Can we save £58k from the budget and give her tasks to someone else?” Or if redundancies start and your boss is questioned by more senior management about what your job actually entails and they realise it’s not as much as maybe it should be for getting paid £58k
Could however be a bit of a case of imposter syndrome whereby you’re not actually appreciating how much value you really add to the business. How long have you worked there? Has your role always been the same and your workload been similar to now?
It could just be that it’s a quieter time for you and in twelve months from now you might be thinking “why was I so worried about not having much to do, look at me now!” and you’re run off your feet.
Try to enjoy it and appreciate how good you appear to have things.

What are all these jobs that you don't have to do anything for? I earn the classic MN 6 figures (ie low hundreds) work PT but have so much to do it's crazy. I have worked hard since I started over 2 decades ago and never stopped.

I'm on around £25,000 (work 30 hours) and I have more work than I could ever manage. I normally work around 5 or 6 hours extra plus overtime at the weekends.

There's no need to be jealous!

@CalMeKate
I have had these jobs. I have cleaned toilets, spent hours on my feet and whilst my kids were young I was a single mum trapped in the cycle of never being able to earn enough to come off tax credits/universal credit. I have never been to uni, I’ve just worked and worked, two even three jobs at a time. It is not that I don’t appreciate hard work, I wouldn’t have got where I am without it but I am good at organising systems, building relationships and have picked up a ton of knowledge of my field of work that’s now valuable. In all honesty not many people would want to do my job even for the money and my colleagues have told me this many times! There is no thanks in my job, in all honesty I am primarily a problem solver so I am mostly dealing with things no one else can deal with and they are usually all negative so I don’t get to experience many happy joyful outcomes anymore. I used to when I was more hands on. There is a price to pay even though I can load my dishwasher during the day sometimes (I did today)

We have a chairman at our company who puts his two pennies worth in two days a month and is paid £250k per year. He holds the same position at another company and contributes the same amount of work/days and presumably gets paid a similar amount. The rest of his time he seems to spend travelling and playing golf. Alright for some eh?!

@KL090 in my experience, problem solvers are the highly paid ones.

I'm on 75k ish and do work pretty hard, I'd say approx 43hrs a week or thereabouts (I'm meant to do 40). And that 43 is because around 6.30pm I give up. I am senior, report into the CEO. Manage a wider team of about 20 people. C suite are "burnt out" and keep having long holidays (COO is going on a 6 month plus sabbatical at the end of the month) and they feel fit to just drop everything on me and the 3 other business managers. Our finance manager also left a couple of weeks ago - without a job to go to as they were so fed up - and of course that person's responsibilities are now also falling on me. I'm seriously fed up. I'm also exhausted but don't have shares so can't exactly go off gallivanting for 6 months at no pay.

Only light at the end of the tunnel is that we're part of a group (marketing agencies) and the group C suite apparently want me to run my own agency within the group (my specialism, no other agency in the group does this and I'm the most senior person with extensive experience in the whole group). Trying to force them to speed that up at the moment.

Love this response on the thread...not spotted any others thinking along these lines yet. Wonder why that is🤔

That said I also worked in a call centre dealing with people crying, screaming and swearing at me all day so I definitely prefer my current position over that.

I'm the same. Newish to the role. Moved up to the next level (planning, facilitating, managing, but no longer doing), and earning more (£80k) but have so much less to do. Was feeling a bit down about it this week, in fact, so good to hear of others in similar situations. I am educated to PhD level and have 21 years' experience in my field so am rather dismayed that I have so much free time. Would like to ask for more work but am worried I'll be made redundant if my superiors realise how little I have to do!

It just reinforces my view that money is incredibly badly distributed in our society... Care, education and health sectors should get the lion's share.

The lion's share of what though? If a business in the private sector makes a lot of money and wants to pay their staff well, that's entirely up to them. Presuming they pay their taxes as required.

Also, my previous manager - also c suite - did virtually nothing and would not respond for days on end but she was made redundant earlier this year so that strategy clearly didn't pay off! (And still currently without a job)

And people wonder why productivity is so low in this country and the economy is tanking!!

I'd rather have job satisfaction and lower pay I think.

Not me but DH is on 55k and if they could drain his blood they would, he is massively over worked and needs to find a different, less stressful job in my view.

Surely it depends what that business is making a lot of money from, and how? Who are their clients/customers? If your customers are ordinary people really struggling to afford what you're offering, but what you're offering is an essential service, and the price you charge those ordinary people results in huge profits for the company, how ethical is that? Huge profits for the company just means you can afford to pay more for people in senior roles to work only a few hours a week. And your shareholders get paid for doing nothing. I guess that's capitalism for you, though.....

The older I get the more frustrated I get with capitalism. It's just a gut feeling that we're doing life "wrong", but it's so entrenched in Western society, and seemingly getting worse, that I wouldn't begin to know how you would start changing anything.