If you show that you can do the work of 5 people:
It will be expected of you to do that much work from then on and if you do less at times it will be held against you!
- Your salary will never be the amount of 5 people, just 1.
- You may get a raise, but it will be tiny compared to the extra work you do.
- They will NEVER hire 4 more people to take up the slack.
- They won't appreciate you any more for all your effort.
- You will burn out your mental and physical health.
- You will live to work and have no life outside of work.
So, if your employer tells you to do other people's jobs because there's not enough people hired, SLOW DOWN. Do 1/2 of your job and 1/2 of the other job. Document how much time it takes you do to your job, how many hours for each daily task. Show HR that your job alone takes up all the work hours of your day. So adding more tasks means you can't complete your own job! This will force the company to hire more people.
– – – – – –
As so many people say that these issues only apply to “low paying jobs” let me give some personal background. I had this happen in 2 companies.
The first, I was an Architectural CAD Designer. I did the work of 4 employees, by entering macros into 3 other computer workstations and letting them all run at the same time. The owner was too cheap to hire 3 other employees at those workstations. I got a 50 cent raise after a year. I quit that shitty company and moved on.
The second, I did the work of 3 people as an Operations Manager. The owner never appreciated the efforts I put in, and eventually gave me even more tasks. So when my work slowed down, the owner got upset that I wasn't keeping up!
In all my career experiences, I've only seen the bootlickers and bullshit-artists that kiss up to their boss be the ones to get promoted in companies. Those people never did even half their own work!
So you do you. If you want to play rat race, go for it. But most people don't seem to benefit at all from burning themselves out.