If you want a raise, you need to prove your worth, do your research, and ask for it! This is great advice to employees, but I have to ask, why is this the employee’s responsibility?
It’s time to flip the tables and put the burden on managers and owners, and HR departments to ensure that people don’t have to come asking for raises. Here’s why.
You have more information than your employees do.
American culture makes it very uncomfortable to talk about salary. This means that your employees generally know their own salary and guess what other people earn. You, on the other hand, know what all your employees earn. You know the salary requests candidates make. Your HR department should have salary survey data and know what the market looks like.
Relying on employees to request raises means you’ll get requests that completely outside of market ranges and, at the same time, other people who are wildly underpaid for their positions. Neither situation is good.
To keep reading, click here: Stop Waiting for Your Employees to Ask for a Raise
I agree that salary reviews should be automatic and should include facts such as market rate. My agency has a rule that raises — even ones that come with big promotions — are limited to 10%, 15% in extraordinary circumstances, with zero consideration of market rates, inflation, etc. The result is that employees like me — who experienced a meteoric rise, from an entry level position to one of four subject-matter experts nationwide — end up more and more underpaid over time. New hires and subordinates all make more, substantially so. My other three peers all make a lot more, having worked their ways up over decades, while I came in later and progressed much faster. I’m regularly ranked as the top performer in our annual Pay for Performance process, but remain at the bottom in the salary range for my position. Thank God I love my job! 🙂
Why? Most companies actively try to keep salaries as low as possible. It’s all about the bottom line. I can’t think of a single company I have ever worked for that would voluntarily increase a salary unless it was a tiny crumb tossed during a yearly review (to show how much they value you!) or after the employee threatens to quit. It’s a nice thought but not realistic for the US (for the most part, I’m sure there are a few companies floating around who actually want to do the right thing and keep their staff happy,)
I just found a job at an equivalent company making 30K more than what I’m currently making. My current company is upset, I’m being told that I’m the lynchpin holding everything together and they don’t know what they will do without me. They’ve made a counteroffer that will match my new salary. I’m still not staying, if the only reason you will pay me what I’m worth is if I state I’m leaving means you really don’t value me enough to pay me a fair salary. They are surprised I’m leaving, but after telling them for a year that things need to change because the workload was untenable didn’t make them change anything why would I want to stay? They didn’t treat me well until I resigned.