The pay rise, is it extinct?

You’ve been with an organisation for a while, maybe a couple of years, you feel like you’ve done some really good work, added value, built relationships, so you decide to take the plunge and ask the boss for a pay rise, but how…

I’d like to make a declaration up front, I have been very unsuccessful in asking for pay rises. In my first professional job, where I asked for one, I was given the sack. They paid me out 2 weeks, which was all they were obligated to do, kept all my sales bonuses for the quarter, because I was not longer entitled to them, and 2 days later I was on the street with a dazed look on my face wondering what happened. 4 years later I’m still not sure what prompted that reaction, but as you can image it has made me weary of the whole pay rise soap opera.

I think soap opera is the correct definition; it doesn’t appear to be about value, or contribution, or morale, it seems to be about politics, games and manipulation, and the worst sort, playing people off against each other.

I have got slightly better with regards my requests for pay rises, I no longer get the sack, SCORE! But I am still not being very successful. The response I got on my last attempt was, and I quote ‘we do not negotiate’. Really, you do not negotiate about pay. I’d been there for close on two years, and the CPI raise I got was less than CPI, so I was earning less at that time then when I started, but it was the phrase that really got to me ‘we do not negotiate’. I was a terrorist, hounding and harassing, if they succumbed to me, it would make them look so vulnerable the pay rise flood gates would open.

My past experiences have left me wondering, is the pay rise dead?

People comment that our generation have no organisation loyalty, we hop and skip about, but is this simply because our organisations appear to see no value in us, to have no loyalty to us?

What I got from my discussion with my organisation at the time was, that the work I had done since I started was ‘fine’ but the relationships I had established, my understanding of the organisation and what made it tick was worth diddly squat, that they could get someone off the street who could do as good a job tomorrow, but that is exactly the problem, with the cost of recruitment, why aren’t organisations willing to fork out $15K in a pay rise?

This article figures the cost of staff turnover at between 50%-150% of salary, it also points out that money isn’t necessarily the driving factor in someone deciding to start or leave a job, and with it typically taking around 3 months to fill a position, what do organisations fear in discussing pay rises?

I’d like to point out, I’m not a greedy, self entitled GenYer, but I do have a mortgage, as many of my peers do, and the moment one has that sack of debt hanging over ones head, money can become more important than that dream job.

Have other people experienced similar problems, or am I just doing something wrong, or is it the norm now, to just change jobs if you want a pay rise.

What has driven organisations to think/act like this? Can we do anything to change it?

My opening paragraph might have been a little misleading. I gave you the impression I was going to provide some magic bullet for getting pay rises, I’m sorry, but I don’t own such a bullet. I’d love to hear from someone that does though, as I'm sure our members would.