Slackers of the world are often looked down upon by those who are highly motivated. They think we slow them down and clog up the workforce. What they don’t often realize are the benefits they get by working among us.

Here are my my arguments to motivated employees as to why you should enjoy working with slackers.

1. You get more money. At my last job, it was well known that each department of the company got a set number of cash to dole out across everybody. Since slackers often don’t care if they get a good raise or not, you get a bigger chunk of the pie. Eat it up.

2. You look better. Slackers tend more often to be unshaven, rumpled, half-tucked, not well dressed, and generally unkempt. Motivated employees look more attractive by default. You cannot underestimate the help that looking good can do for a motivated employee’s upward mobility.

3. You get better performance reviews. Certain companies have a stringent scales where only 10% of employees can rate exceed expectations, another 10% rate below expectations, and the other 80% meet expectations. I happily reside near the mid-to-lower meets section. I am one less person trying to exceed. A higher rating for motivated employees usually leads back to step 1.

4. Slackers are less people to argue with. There is nothing worse than sitting in a 2 day meeting (or conference call) with fourteen people from a number of different departments all trying to create a single document. Paragraphs stretch to hours, pages into days. If slackers were actively invested in the outcome, it would last even longer. We have faith in the highly motivated that they will be able to figure it out, and then we’ll do what is assigned.

5. Slackers do the grunt work. When highly motivated individuals and those high up the corporate ladder make their grand decisions, who is it that carries out the action manual work of creating reports and documents and coding? The slackers. Sure, we may take a month to complete something that could be done in a week, but we still do it.

And there you have it. The highly motivated should embrace all of the slackers of the world!

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