Corporate Adulting
Calculating ROY (Return on You)
The Article that Changed How I Thought About Work
About 8 or 9 years ago, while doing some research, I ran across an interesting article from consultants Fred Nickols and Harvey Bergholz. This article, called What’s the Return on You (ROY)?, compares the ROI of a business effort to the ROY (Return on You) as an employee.
The article was written at the peak of the 2008 recession and is extremely relevant for today too — as more and more people are losing their jobs, being furloughed and companies are struggling to evaluate the value that their resources are adding to the bottom line.
I remember reading this article and thinking, “I never thought of the ROY!”
It changed the way that I approached my work and how I thought about the contributions I made. It also made me have a less “entitled” mindset as an employee.
The concept of the ROY is pretty simple. Based on the company’s investments in you (salary, benefits, equipment, heating, and air conditioning (!), building space, travel costs, etc.)…it asks the question “what value is the company deriving from your employment?”
Once the overhead costs are paid, are you earning your keep as an employee? Are you adding value that is equivalent to or ideally more than what the company is paying to keep you?
After all, companies are in business to make money. If you are not contributing to the bottom line in some tangible way by the value you add with your expertise, skills, creativity, problem-solving skills, sales abilities…then you may want to really think about your contributions and ultimately, your ROY.
In their article, Nickols and Bergholz provide a ROY spreadsheet that can help you calculate your ROY. Even if you don’t have the hard dollar numbers, putting in some estimates of the costs of your employment versus the results you produce may be a very illuminating exercise.
For those of us who are in roles that are not directly revenue-producing, this is a great exercise to go through. When I led the training team at my last company, we thought a lot about the ROY of our group. What were we doing to help our employees grow, and how could we quantify the value of that growth? We did a number of cost comparisons to outsourcing the services that we provided and could provide evidence of the savings that we achieved. The less tangible items were when we helped decrease team friction and improve the capabilities of leaders. These items provided immeasurable value in helping the organization succeed but were exceedingly difficult to measure in a hard dollar sense.
Calculate your ROY and ask yourself the hard question — are you making contributions worth the investment that is being made in you?
As humans, we are all worth it — but in the black-and-white of a company’s bottom line, are you putting in the time, energy, and contributions to justify your continued employment?
Know your ROY. It will change your complete mindset about your work.
Thanks for reading! Read more of my Corporate Adulting Blog series at https://monicaojendyk.medium.com/.
