Advice with pay rise letter

[DB_SamX]

I posted last year about looking for another job, but I stayed at my current one after all after a small bonus (£1k) and pay rise (£2k). https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...to-make-you-leave-current-comfy-job.18951284/

I am started to look again due to cost of living increases, especially my mortgage, which might go up at least £300/month from Feb next year, despite still being otehrwise happy with my role. Since February, a Director has retired, so I have taken on more important responsibilies, but they are not looking to replace his role due to company budget (which I hoped for).

I am still underpaid - £62k FTE (+9% pension), but market rate for my job role based on ads out there is easily £65-70k (+say 5% pension). I recently went for an interview after being approached in July by a recruiter, and have been offerred a promotion to Assiciate Director, and a pay of £75k (potentially £80k with negotiation). However, I won't accept it as it's central London-based (but hybrid), and travel costs will be £9k+ and involve 3h travel per day, so the pay rise wouldn't cover it (especially once you factor 40% tax cut on increase) and loss of personal time. I am on the lookout for jobs which are closer (30ish mins each way).

I don't want to threaten my current company that I will leave for this offer, and they will be smart enough to work out the travel implications, but I do want to use the offer to demonstrate my market value.

I will write a letter this weekend asking for a pay rise, outlining all my new responsibilities, achievements, etc, and that's fine, but I am really struggling to find the words/approach for demonstrating my value using the offer. I don't want it to be a theat, but I don't want to come across as too soft either. Any tips or advice on wording? Not found much online. Everything I've read (maybe biased due to being american articles) suggests the minute I use an offer as argument, they'll see me as wanting out. I doubt that will be the case for me, but it does worry me a bit.

 

[Alex_L]

I wouldn’t write a letter would be my main advice. Have a conversation but be prepared.

A few thoughts having been on the other side of this:

- That offer in London would be easy to bat away in their shoes. Strip out the commute costs (partly why it’s higher…) and you’re left with about 5-10k bump for 2 hours extra daily commuting. If I didn’t want to give you a pay rise I’d say go enjoy the 10k for two hours a day on dysfunctional trains where you’ll likely end up working anyway.
- I’d also go in with an open mind as they might not view the stepping up you’ve done in the same way - Could they view it as you doing the job they’re paying you for?

In terms of the conversation:

- I’d set out the additional things you’re doing and crucially why they matter - Has it increased top/bottom line, landed new clients etc.
- Be forward thinking - what ideas for the future do you have? What would you be willing to commit to if they bump your pay?
- What apart from salary would help you? Could they put you on some professional training? Give you opportunities to do other things in the company to build your skills? It might be they simply can’t increase your salary now but could get you a load of training which might allow them to increase your salary in 6 months time if you’ve got additional skills or qualifications.
- If they say no now, what would you need to do to change that? I.e. could you agree some tangible goals that you could tick off in 6 months with an agreement that gets you a pay rise

 

[HACO]

Feel free to write down your thoughts to help you plan for the conversation, but don't write them a letter. Speak with your manager instead.

I've used job offers to negotiate better pay in the past, and generally details don't matter. Focus on pay and career progression, they don't need to know that you're bluffing or the other job is in London (you can always say the new company is remote friendly), and they are not going to bother working out travel implications.

 

[Quartz]

However, I won't accept it as it's central London-based (but hybrid), and travel costs will be £9k+ and involve 3h travel per day, so the pay rise wouldn't cover it (especially once you factor 40% tax cut on increase) and loss of personal time.

How much would it cost to move to London?

 

[Felon]

I don't want to threaten my current company that I will leave for this offer, and they will be smart enough to work out the travel implications, but I do want to use the offer to demonstrate my market value.

I did this before, after I worked my ass off and delivered an enormous amount of stuff thinking the company would yield and give me a big rise, instead they were like "lol, leave if you like", so I did and regretted it .

The mistake I made, was misunderstanding my place in the business - yes I did a heck of a lot of stuff, but I wasn't as visible to senior leadership as I should have been, so nobody really cared about it, or as much as I thought they did.

A peer who who did a similar level of work to me in the same role, but who reguarly attended senior meetings with leadership teams did the same (threatened to leave) and got offered a $100k cash retention bonus.

The one thing I learnt is to fully understand your place in the business and how you're perceived by leadership before asking for a rise, and also be mindful of going into a conversation with somebody (manager) who has these types of conversations all the time, when you likely don't.

Not sure if that helps, but good luck with getting more cash.

 

[FishThrower]

I did this before, after I worked my ass off and delivered an enormous amount of stuff thinking the company would yield and give me a big rise, instead they were like "lol, leave if you like", so I did and regretted it .

The mistake I made, was misunderstanding my place in the business - yes I did a heck of a lot of stuff, but I wasn't as visible to senior leadership as I should have been, so nobody really cared about it, or as much as I thought they did.

A peer who who did a similar level of work to me in the same role, but who reguarly attended senior meetings with leadership teams did the same (threatened to leave) and got offered a $100k cash retention bonus.

The one thing I learnt is to fully understand your place in the business and how you're perceived by leadership before asking for a rise, and also be mindful of going into a conversation with somebody (manager) who has these types of conversations all the time, when you likely don't.

Not sure if that helps, but good luck with getting more cash.

Perception is hugly important if you want to be respected at work.

One of the things that really frustrates me with the LinkedIn crowd, life coaches and management training, is that they always preach about passing all credit onto your subordinates…… i have seen a few people do this at the work place and it never ends well for them, as they get over looked for promotions and pay rises as it gives senior management the perception that your staff is doing all of the work, and the start questioning what the manager is contributing.

My direct manager was a superb man manager, always shared information with his team, always giving other people credit, cut a long story short, he got made redundant and one of his subordinates ( who wasn’t any better) got promoted into a similar role that he was doing. I have seen this happen a couple of other times in businesses as well.

All of the senior people I speak to ( 100k a year plus) all admit that the best advice they give is “ don’t be too helpful and bend over backwards constantly for other teams , and be careful on how much you share on your job”, it’s a very defensive approach but unfortunately it’s a game you have to play at most companies.

If you want to get a decent pay rise, you need another offer on the table from another company and play them off each other, our company has a retention amount in their budget to keep staff and can only be accessed when someone hands in their notice.

 

[Nitefly]

Tbh I’m not sure saying “X place pays a few grand more” will result in anything. There’s always jobs that pay more - for most people! Someone will always be paid more than you for the same job… you have to make peace with that and not let it be what is causing unhappiness with your situation. If the salary isn’t good enough for you regardless then that’s another matter.

I’d be inclined to frame it as: “look, this role/salary isn’t working for me - what is the gameplan for me earning more, realistically? I’m asking because I’m trying to make it work for me here, which would be my ideal outcome. Help me come up with a plan.” and see how they react. If they says “it is what it is” then you know where you stand and you probably need to move on.

Maybe you need to mix it up regardless, for a fresh perspective.

 

[DB_SamX]

Thank you for all the opinions, been thinking about it a lot overnight. I've decided to bring it up as a chat/meeting tomorrow but writing down my thoughts beforehand.

For context, we are a SME, not a big corporation, and I am only in an office of around 20 technical staff, and 4th highest role. So I already have a close relationship with the two board directors, and they know what I do, but maybe need reminding - I manage and run building projects and teams, and whilst we do monitor profit, we don't have sales or defined profit targets on a project by project basis; beyond engineering, I do loads of business management too - training, mentoring, mental health, improving processes/quality, workload, resourcing, generating new work, carbon reduction plans, recruitment, etc. Most of these I volunteered for, or naturally took over from the director who retired. I have a lot of autonomy and flexibility, which I don't take for granted.

Right now I don't see myself moving to London, and would prefer not to given the choice, but I am happy to move back to Surrey/Berkshire as I'll also be closer to my folks. I did a 2 year stint in London in my early 30s and left as that rat race didn't suit me. So as @Nitefly said, I may have to make my peace with the like-for-like salary comparison, and reframe the conversation as suggested. I could see myself saying my target is 10% increase by end of the year, and 15% by end of financial year, so how can I get there. And agree that if it's not in the company's budget, at least I'll know where I stand and plan accordingly for next year.

 

[HangTime]

What was the outcome of the discussion?

 

[Rroff]

The mistake I made, was misunderstanding my place in the business - yes I did a heck of a lot of stuff, but I wasn't as visible to senior leadership as I should have been, so nobody really cared about it, or as much as I thought they did.

This can be a huge problem - I was semi-jokingly told recently I'm not allowed any more time off as things always seem to "go wrong" when I'm on holiday - senior leadership don't see just how much damage control I am doing to keep things running smoothly on a day to day basis. Which also leads to the whole debate as to how much I should be cluing them in so as the business can more effectively manage things - but that is itself always a difficult conversation and often seen in the wrong light.

 

[Participant]

Personally in this scenario I just relentlessly look for new roles until I get offered one I'd actually want, then resign and see what they say.

Normally ends up with me leaving, but you at least know for sure where you stand and have a nice decision to make. It adds jeopardy to the conversation for them, which always makes people rethink the scenario.

 

[jon86]

... semi-jokingly told recently I'm not allowed any more time off as things always seem to "go wrong" when I'm on holiday - senior leadership don't see just how much damage control I am doing to keep things running smoothly on a day to day basis. ...

It sounds like you're holding the bag, as it were, and are responsible for keeping things afloat. I'd be wary about doing that for too long but yourself, and consider training some other folks to be able to at least take care of things while you're not working. It's likely am opportunity to do some future/success planning, which can usually be painted in a good light, like you're doing your bosses a big favor.

Personally in this scenario I just relentlessly look for new roles until I get offered one I'd actually want, then resign and see what they say.

Normally ends up with me leaving, but you at least know for sure where you stand and have a nice decision to make. It adds jeopardy to the conversation for them, which always makes people rethink the scenario.

Yeah, I'm not staying around for a long time if I'm holding everything together and I'm not being handsomely paid for it. I'll either train up some folks so that the load is shared, or I'll get my pay increased to be commensurate of the value that I'm bringing to the business, or likely a combination of the two.

 

[Rroff]

It sounds like you're holding the bag, as it were, and are responsible for keeping things afloat. I'd be wary about doing that for too long but yourself, and consider training some other folks to be able to at least take care of things while you're not working. It's likely am opportunity to do some future/success planning, which can usually be painted in a good light, like you're doing your bosses a big favor.

There are other people but they don't have my experience and not something you can easily impart. There is also a big complication here in that I was sort of seconded into covering parts of a management role but not actually that level in the company.

 

[jon86]

There is also a big complication here in that I was sort of seconded into covering parts of a management role but not actually that level in the company.

It sounds like you should be at least paid at a level commensurate to the contributions that you're making to the business, even if you don't have the title (which you probably should have).

 

[Rroff]

It sounds like you should be at least paid at a level commensurate to the contributions that you're making to the business, even if you don't have the title (which you probably should have).

I get a pay uplift for covering the role, to be honest I'm kind of keeping my head down as I get most of the perks without having to make the hard decisions.

 

[HangTime]

The mistake I made, was misunderstanding my place in the business - yes I did a heck of a lot of stuff, but I wasn't as visible to senior leadership as I should have been, so nobody really cared about it, or as much as I thought they did.

This is quite common. Many years ago I was doing a job alongside one co-worker, it was pretty proprietary in nature and the only other person who understood (most of) it was someone who'd previously done the job before moving into another part of the business. It was a relatively complicated job, lots of tacit knowledge, pressure scenarios when things went wrong. The pay was truly abysmal and we were 'looked down on' by some of the company I'm pretty sure, asked to do lots of menial tasks etc.
Anyhow, they decided they were going to outsource our operation. As it happened, I was already lined up to move into another role internally. The outsourcing wasn't done 100% as there were some edge cases that didn't fit that well with the outsourcing partner. My co-worker moved into another role internally and they had a temp doing the remainder of our job alongside another person in our department. She literally quit after a week saying it was too stressful. So they then hired in an (expensive) contractor to cover it with me helping him out a couple of hours a day. I'm pretty confident he would have cost the company more than double what myself and my colleague were earning combined, even ignoring whatever the outsourcing cost was. Ultimately they ended up giving my colleague his old job back as he wasn't really enjoying what he'd moved into. The department I moved to was told it would be made redundant some months later following a merge with a larger org (apparently they actually backed away from that as it was a really really stupid idea, but I'd found a better job by then).

The fact of the matter is, the senior leadership (perhaps understandably) really had no idea the level of complexity of what we were doing. They understood it was quite critical but thought it was simple in nature and could be done by anyone or easily outsourced. My honest assessment in hindsight was that job should have paid more than double what it did (it was my first job after uni, so I didn't really know any better). It was more stressful than other jobs I've had literally paying 10x as much.

 

[Bounce]

Sounds like you doing a lot of roles which is typical for an SME, this will make it very difficult to benchmark your pay vs the market place.

There is also a risk that are being taken advantage of, which many companies do. The less they pay you the more money the shareholders can take home.

My advice is to have that open and honest conversation with your line manager and if they don't see your value its time to move on.

 

[dowie]

Firstly, there is nothing wrong with going for interviews for jobs you're maybe not 100% sure on, it's a two-way process and it's up to them to make a nice offer etc.. but if you know you're not going to take it because it's in London then that's a bit unethical.

I recently went for an interview after being approached in July by a recruiter, and have been offerred a promotion to Assiciate Director, and a pay of £75k (potentially £80k with negotiation). However, I won't accept it as it's central London-based (but hybrid), and travel costs [...]

You can find out a range in the initial call with a recruiter (or in some cases from an advert) so you don't need to waste that other company's time interviewing.

If you've got an offer and you're going to tell your company about it then it really ought to be something you'd be happy to take or perhaps even mention as part of a resignation, as in you hand in your notice and mention that you are open to counter offers.

It's not so good if you're not going to take it anyway and simply mention it because what are you really saying in that case? Essentially passively aggressively threatening to leave? That can work if you're really needed but it's a suboptimal way of going about things.

Do you have an annual review/annual pay rise? If so, why wasn't this dissatisfaction mentioned then? That would be the ideal time to do it, mention you feel you're worth more (with justifications, this could include salary surveys and a sample of current job postings) and try to put together a plan to get you there. After all your immediate manager might not have the discretion to just dish out a big pay rise but if you can present a good argument you'd be helping them make the argument too.

If this is the first time you've mentioned it and you're otherwise keen to stay there if they can sort the pay situation out then including a veiled threat re: a job offer (which you're not even going to take) is iffy. If on the other hand, you've already mentioned dissatisfaction with pay, like at your annual review/when they've given you your annual pay rise and you've had a chat and they've not addressed it then I think you need to go and get a real job offer you're actually willing to take.

 

[Felon]

The fact of the matter is, the senior leadership (perhaps understandably) really had no idea the level of complexity of what we were doing. They understood it was quite critical but thought it was simple in nature and could be done by anyone or easily outsourced. My honest assessment in hindsight was that job should have paid more than double what it did (it was my first job after uni, so I didn't really know any better). It was more stressful than other jobs I've had literally paying 10x as much.

I had an interesting conversation with one of the best managers I ever had in LA, he was a gigantic monster of a man - like the mountain from game of thrones, but so quiet and softly spoken - but when he did speak, it was always good stuff that came out.

I remember explaining to him, how this thing our team had built - was automatically filtering thousands of DDOS attacks per day, some in the 100Gbps region, fully automated - it was basically the Ferrari of DDOS filtering at the time, home-grown and how the senior leadership team had no idea just how much it was carrying the business.

He basically replied by telling me, "The senior leadership team don't like the stress of running a Ferrari, things like that keep them up at night, they'd rather give it all to AWS"

In that moment it all made sense to me, the difference between perception - a team of people building cool stuff, getting paid well, happy but feeling a little "forgotten" in contrast a senior leadership team, who just want the least stress possible and no suprises - and Ferraris do have a habit of throwing up suprises.

From the perspective of the senior leadership team, the product we'd made was a 2 min conversation along the lines of, "Anti DDOS - ok cool" they didn't really care, however a conversation regarding giving it all to AWS and the strategy involved and those decisions and that process, is much more interesting to them - those sorts of things are where I think most of the money is.

 

[DB_SamX]

What was the outcome of the discussion?

Not yet. Had a senior colleague go on sick leave last Thursday. Was expecting him back Monday but he's signed off all week. So we're all chipping in to pick up his workload.

I could capitalise on the situation but it feels wrong to me. I'll have the chat in coming days or weeks when the opportunity presents it.