Since 2000 – 2014, we lived next to a family that made it a priority to take vacations. There was the obligatory 10 days in a beach house on the Outer Banks in North Carolina in July. Then the cruise sometime in the winter. The time in between was filled with weekends away in their lake house up at Deep Creek Lake for snow and water-skiing and then frequent getaways to Ocean City in the summer.
I didn’t have a problem with that. To each his own.
The challenge was when our kids saw that and wondered why we didn’t do lots of vacations. Now mind you our kids had been to Disney in Orlando three times and also to Ormond Beach which is near Daytona (we have a time share). They also went on numerous road trips to different parts of the country and accompanied me on some of my business trips to Puerto Rico and to California. They’ve did quite a bit of stuff.
My wife and I by comparison took few vacations growing up. I can remember going to San Diego a couple of times and up to my great uncle’s cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains two times when I was a kid. My wife did a big trip via car to the Grand Canyon and several other scenic stops before she left for boot camp in 1984. Most of the time she just went on the road to visit family. We both think of our family vacations with our kids as pretty good and fairly regular. Certainly they have been more spectacular than what we grew up with.
You might think our kids our spoiled. You might think our kids are fortunate. You might also think our kids have been deprived. You might think our next-door neighbors are excessive. Regardless of what you think, your judgment would be based solely on the concept of BENCHMARKING.
Benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other industries. In my experience, executives are very concerned with how their company’s performance stacks up against the competition. I’ve also seen executives who want employee engagement surveys that show how their engagement scores stack up with companies of similar scope and size.
Here’s my question:
WHO CARES?
Measuring your company’s performance against that of another’s is a irrelevant as my kids measuring their vacation satisfaction against that of our neighbors. Here are some examples of how silly this is:
“My dad was a drunk but since yours was a drug addict, my childhood was better.”
“My car is reliable and dependable, but since you have a new Escalade, my car suddenly isn’t good enough.”
“My company’s turnover rate is 35% but since the industry standard is 40%, I shouldn’t feel too bad.”
Quit comparing yourself to others and match up against yourself. Employees don’t care if the engagement score in your company is top of the industry standard. What difference does that make if they’re miserable? If you’ve been happy with your car, why should it suddenly not satisfy you if your co-worker gets a new one?
Set your OWN standards for satisfaction, excellence, and success. Comparing yourself to others is a losing game. On a personal or professional level, the only true standard is the one you set objectively for yourself.