Advocating For Your Own Pay

How to speak up for yourself.

So what if you really don’t want to leave your job, and your current pay just isn’t cutting it for you anymore? You need to figure out how to meaningfully move the needle at work. It’s not likely to be a quick fix, and you’ll have to have a lot of potentially awkward conversations. It’s worth it to come up with a plan, though.

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

Understand how your company does compensation planning.

Most companies have some sort of compensation planning process and philosophy. In the best cases, they’ll have that published somewhere for employees to understand. This facilitates much better employer/employee relationships, since a critical system that determines their livelihood doesn’t feel like an opaque box of mystery. They’re able to develop a system of understanding, and it leads to much more productive and level conversations with their managers if something feels off.

After you’ve read and understand the process and philosophy, ask your manager if you can diagram it out in front of them to check for your understanding. This is, in general, a good debugging tool to have in your tool kit with your manager for any question you have. If your manager doesn’t have the answer, write it down in your shared notes and ask them to get back to you with a due date and make sure you put it on the agenda for your next conversation. This helps keep you both accountable to following up.

If your employer ties performance review scores to pay increases, for example, then it might be increasingly more important for you to make sure you can get into the next higher performance score “bucket.” You should be able to understand who controls the outcome of that decision and how to make sure you’re able to communicate your work/impact to them. Maybe you need to achieve a promotion first, and that could mean waiting for a spot to open up. Regardless of what it is, make sure you’re writing it down with shared understanding.