RED FLAGS VS GREEN FLAGS

This meeting topic has been originally created by JB:

What makes a company, a job, a team, worth sticking around or moving for? Is the devil you know better than the devil you don’t? These are questions that I ponder quite often as I have been in a non-committal job search for the past 4 years. 

We’ve now been part of the professional workforce for quite a few years (hello Senior Engineers and Managers – what!?); some of us have had the same job since graduation and some of us have moved around. By now, hopefully we are starting to have some idea of what we’d like our workplace to look like, whether we like what we’ve got or what we’d like to see for ourselves. We’re at the point that many of us no longer need to grind to ‘prove’ ourselves. We’ve got a good base skillset which is transferrable and we are assets. At this point I’m (pretty much) past the mindset that “I’ll take whatever I can and be grateful for it”. 

So what is it that we can be looking for in our current workplaces or future workplaces to secure what we want? For the last several months dating ‘red flags’ and ‘green flags’ have been making their rounds on my social media and it’s gotten me thinking. Can we translate these flags to our jobs? 

* Are there indicators that we can look for which will help us identify workplaces that are compatible with ourselves?

* Are there things you consider to be ‘green flags’ for work? What about ‘red flags’? Is there any way to identify these before you take a job? 

* Is it the actual day-to-day work, work life balance, manager, pay, bonuses, benefits or something else that keeps you around or will have you move?

Thanks JB!