There is no such thing as complete indispensability at work since entire companies can go bankrupt, certain aspects of a business can become obsolete, and governments can even come to a standstill or be overthrown. These are dark realities, but certainty is simply not possible. That said, you can put yourself in a position where if your employer exists at all, you will still have a job if you want it.
If you are the person your boss dreads replacing, you will be among the 20% of folks that survive the layoff of 80% of your employer’s staff—if you want to stay. Eliminate the fear that you will suddenly lose your job without any notice by making yourself your team’s indispensable employee.
1. Be the most organized.
Be organized. It sounds simple, but almost everyone is disorganized. The organization you need can be broken into two parts:
Know where everything is located.
Know the current status of work.
First, you are the person that can find anything in the depths of your employer’s shared drive or file folders. The standard operating procedures or business rules? You can send them over within a minute. The policy memo pertinent to that issue? You can share the path to it in seconds. If you can navigate through all the data more quickly than everyone around you, you become indispensable because folks will go to you just because they cannot find the Excel workbook with data from 2018.
Second, pay attention to the status of any major projects, so if someone asks about Project A, you are the one who can immediately offer a sentence about the status. Most folks spend their careers siloed without paying attention to the issues of those around them. Once you start paying attention to the work of other team members, you become an asset to the entire team with status updates.
To take this a step further, once you start listening to team members over time, you will be able to tell when they are stressed and offer to take a small task that you absolutely do not mind doing off of their to-do list in their moment of overload. Your coworker will think you are the greatest person in the world for saving them in their difficult moment and anticipating exactly what help they need. Want to hit peak indispensability? Do this for your boss. If you can read when your supervisor is overwhelmed and anticipate a task that will lighten their to-do list, you have made it.
If being organized, and remembering these details, sounds overwhelming because you do not have a good memory or just use your brain space on your multiple side hustles, family obligations, community activities, and workout plans, fear not. You do not need to remember anything! Create an Excel spreadsheet, a private webpage, your own Asana project, or whatever works best for your brain. Each time you hear a detail about a project mentioned in a meeting, write it down and add it to your giant spreadsheet of information. In particular, add any key dates, potential delays that seem concerning, or progress within the process of a project. Dump your brain into a spreadsheet or other organizer, so you can use your brainpower elsewhere. When you get a question, navigate to your organizer immediately to look like a genius.
2. Control the schedule.
This goes hand-in-hand with staying organized regarding project statuses. Know your team’s calendar better than anyone, and eventually become the apparent planner who should create the team calendar. Start by regularly reviewing the calendar, and begin to flag any conflicting events. A common one in my office is folks making a recurring event that they will be in the office on Wednesday but forgetting to remove that event when they are on vacation for the week. If Lionel is in Aruba, he probably is not coming into the office! Flag this, and folks will begin looking to you to maintain the calendar.
For your own priorities, plan way in advance. I have my leave in the calendar for eight months from now. Nobody is going to say I cannot go to Boston for the Red Sox vs. Dodgers series because it is there blocking any scheduling conflicts eight months in advance. If you plan out the farthest, you will get every day of leave you want.
Between your advanced planning and your calendar maintenance, you become able to shape the calendar for your entire team. You will have a say over the timing of events and be able to push things back or move them earlier according to your needs and the overall schedule needs. This allows you to prioritize your non-work schedule while being a resource for your coworkers.
And you will certainly be a resource: Most employees flit from emergency to emergency, without planning for the week or considering the schedule beyond today, this week, this month. You are different and have an idea of the bigger picture. When someone forgets to address an important task or event, you can flag this for them and save them from falling into the trap of only addressing the urgent rather than focusing on the important. The more coworkers you save from this trap, the more useful you become.
3. Take on the weird required project(s) that no one wants to do.
On every team, there is a weird or tedious project that feels disconnected from the day-to-day work that your team does, and absolutely nobody wants to do it. You may not want to do it either. However, owning that project makes you more difficult to replace because replacing you means someone else would have to take responsibility for that project.
I am the Records Liaison for my team. My team consists of high-ranking government employees and contractors who are almost all subject matter experts (SMEs) with years of experience on a technical and detailed process. Nobody gets the training and expertise to be a GS-14 or a SME to then manage the records. Except for this SME! I took on the project, got certified, and ended up doing the job so well that I represented the agency during our annual audit. Not only does nobody on my team want to go through the process of getting certified and dealing with our records, now the front office of the agency wants to keep me around to continue working with them for future audits. Job security maintained.
4. Become the tech support helpline. (Alt: Become the math support helpline.)
If you work in any office where the average person is not tech-savvy, become the tech support helpline. This does not necessarily mean learning five coding languages. I help folks create fillable PDFs and make pivot tables. Neither of these tasks is difficult or high-tech. When I wrote a macro in Excel to streamline our daily reports, it was viewed as true magic. Becoming extremely comfortable with basic technology is enough to be your office’s in-house tech support person. Your coworkers will appreciate having someone they can send a quick Slack message to ask a question rather than calling a central tech support line.
If you are in a high-tech industry but one that is more creative, being the math support helpline is an alternative. (I have become both for my team.) Having an advanced knowledge of high school math is enough to make you more math-proficient than your peers, unless you work with a bunch of actuaries. In reality, and in case you are an actuary, you can be a support helpline for just about any hard skill that your coworkers lack. If you can save your coworkers a call by providing in-house support, you become a more valuable employee.
For anyone thinking they do not have any hard skills that would add value to the team, you can teach yourself! I am entirely self-taught in Excel and now write macros. Take a free online training course, play around a bit, and get comfortable searching for solutions on the Internet.
5. Be the team innovator.
Once you get comfortable being the person who will google the solution to figure out your team’s technology question, you are on the fast track to becoming your team’s innovator. You are already the organized person who tracks your team’s projects and processes closely, so you will start to notice where processes get stuck or could use improvement. Combine your awareness from being organized with your hard skills, and brainstorm solutions when you see deficiencies.
When you start expediting work tasks or adding user-friendly organization to team-wide processes, you begin adding value beyond average employees. Show your supervisor how the whole team can save time or prevent mistakes from happening, and your supervisor will never want you to leave.
One important part of becoming your team’s innovator: This means setting boundaries and taking time for yourself because creativity comes from stepping away from projects, exercising, participating in individual development through learning, reading, conversing with folks outside of work, and participating in other outside activities that stimulate your brain in numerous ways. The solution to your team’s work problem is best solved by stepping away from the environment that allowed it to exist—your work! If you want to be the innovator, the creative person with the solutions, you need to lock your computer and go for a walk while listening to a podcast or have a discussion with a non-work person. We innovate by reaching beyond our standard environment, so go searching for solutions.
By the time you become an innovator at work, your work team will truly need your creativity in-house. As someone with the real name “Alexa,” I get a lot of jokes at work that I am our office AI who knows the answer to anything or can devise a solution quickly. Steps #1–4 got me to this point, as does thinking creatively in a number of different areas outside of my day job each day. To find enough outside inspiration, make sure to keep work to your work hours, and show up the next day with the kind of solution that makes you an indispensable employee.
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