I see a lot of posts around here about people feeling cheated at work, concerned about the salaries of others, or just in general wanting a raise. I thought it might be helpful to share some experience and perspective.
In general, this is meant to refer to companies that are not intentionally defrauding employees. This is not about a small business scrapping for money or other black and white things like that.
Some guiding principles:
- There are three sides to every story. It helps to put yourself in the employers position and realize not everything might be how you see it.
- There is value in things like group negotiations, understanding your value or the compensation of your peers, but you do not usually know all of the factors involved. Compensation can be based on many things, and your individual responsibilities are not the only thing. So two people in the same job with the same responsibilities do not always command the same compensation. Perhaps your colleague has more experience than you do. You just don't always know. Try and cool down and let the emotions subside before making decisions.
- In line with both of the above, getting passed up for a promotion sucks, but you again may or may not know the full story.
- Expectations are crucial. Mismanaged, mis-set or misunderstood expectations probably account for 90% of all workplace issues, let alone with performance and pay.
So what do you do?
- Your boss should be open to communication about pay. If you cannot approach your boss (or their boss) about this, the path is totally different.
- The time to start talking about a raise is well before you want one, not after. Most companies have budgets and processes. It is sometimes difficult for you to just walk in get a substantial raise (more than 2-3%). It simply might not be authorized or budgeted. You might be the best employee in the world, if it is unplanned, you are already at a disadvantage.
- Start a conversation 6-12 months in advance. Talk to your boss about your goals. If you are making 50k and want to make 60k, you should be saying something like "I enjoy my work here and would like to discuss some career and compensation goals I have and get your feedback. I was hoping to set a goal we could work together on where I could make 60k. What do you think?" This does a few things:
- Makes the conversation safe and open.
- Very quickly gets expectations on the table. If your boss says "there is no path where you can make 60k here", you get to decide if you want to stick it out knowing the ceiling. But at least you now know. They may also respond with something like "I think we should work on that over an 18 month timeframe." This is the response you want.
- You want to hear what your boss would like differently from you. The truth is, many employees think they are role models, and they simply aren't. This is not because the employee is "bad" but simply because the definition of "role model" is not well understood. Performance needs to be regularly reviewed and it should never be a surprise. If you are scared of your year-end review because you don't know what your scores/rankings are, the employer is doing it wrong but you can help steer it. Talk out the expectations. You should be striving to have an agreement with your boss that "if I do these 3 things, my compensation will be increased to 60k on 03/01/2020".
- Now comes the important part, follow up! Letting this go for a year is a recipe for a disaster. You will wind up failing because your boss will say "you didn't do X". If you didn't know you weren't meeting what they were looking for, how can you improve? You need to have sit downs and honest reviews every 3 months. This gives you the opportunity to quickly correct any issues. If you aren't doing what your employer is looking for, you at least now know to set your expectations accordingly that you will not get that raise. More importantly, hopefully you are doing what they are looking for and you can continue to reaffirm that you are aligned on targets.
This type of method should work in most environments. Of course there are rogue employers, or those will not follow through, but I don't think any strategy works there. The biggest takeaways here is that this is all about expectations. Nothing is more frustrating than two people not on the same page and it is a simple fix. You may think you are an all-star and your boss thinks you suck. It doesn't matter if one is right or one is wrong - that isn't what it is about. It is about getting to a mutual understanding of what "sucking" means and what "all-star" means. That is usually where the disconnect is.
Hope this helps someone.
Submitted March 14, 2019 at 09:59PM by Careless_Register https://ift.tt/2u7g7kG
