Episode Transcript
James: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Future of Team podcast. My name is James Giroux and my cohost Dee Teal is here with me as well. Hi Dee.
Dee: Hi.
James: Well, this week we are taking the lid off of a topic that causes the most confident of people to squirm in their seats when they are on the receiving end of it.
And it is the whole idea of navigating salary conversations. Oh, even saying it gives me a shiver that goes up my spine. Oh, I don’t even know Dee where to begin because like the we’re going to take a look at it from two angles. So there’s the angle obviously of the recipient, the person who is negotiating the salary on their behalf, but then there’s also the manager or the hiring manager or the HR rep or whatever, who’s on the other side of that conversation, trying to navigate that as well.
I don’t even know where to begin, but there is, there it is that, you know, like it is obviously a big deal.
Dee: So the first question is why is that such a big deal? And when, and when you lay it out like that, the first thing that I hear is the immediate conflict, right? You’ve got a company that has limits on their budget that only wants to pay a certain amount.
And you’ve got a recipient, you know an individual contributor on the other side of that going, I want more money. And so immediately there’s a tension just even in that, even in the company that wants to give everybody just the most beautiful experience of working, assuming that there are companies out there that like that there is still that conflict.
And, and so is that the thing? Do you think that’s the thing that is the first? And that, why is this conversation so awkward? I
James: think because, because it’s so easy to have a conversation on salary, be misconstrued or misinterpreted as greed or selfishness, right. Or unhappiness, right. That like, to me, those are the things that I wrestle with is it’s like, well, no, I love my job.
I love, you know, what I do and where, where we’re going. But at the same time, I also like, like, just because I’m satisfied with my role. Doesn’t mean I should be satisfied with my pay because I don’t know like it’s hard because you know like I’ve been watching a lot of TikTok videos recently and there’s there’s a couple of of very popular ones.
There’s one maybe you’ve seen it about a guy Who they do a reenactment of him talking to his manager and they’re doing their salary negotiations and she’s going, well, you know, like this last year it just felt a little bit like you were phoning it in, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah. And you’ve seen this one, but he goes, yeah, well, last year, you know, I was in my review and I asked.
About a salary increase. And you said no. And you said, you know, I said, well, what’s my salary that’s well, it’s fair market value. And I said, well, what’s my salary, you know, according to fair market values, well, you’re under the, the benchmark or under the median. And, and they still said no to a salary rise, right?
Like, and it’s like, that to me is the kind of thing it’s like, Yeah. Oh, that tension, right? You know, the
Dee: word that jumps, well, the word that jumps out of me, there is value. Yeah. What do you, what do you value? And so I think for an individual contributor coming to a salary negotiation, there’s that sense of, I know what I’m valued.
I know, I know what I value, or I think I know how much. I am of value. Mm. Or there’s that tension of the impo, if there’s the imposter also involved going you know, maybe I’m not as value, you know, that may, that brings attention to the conversation in terms of I undervalue or overvalue myself.
And then the, and then again, it’s that tension for the employer of this is how much we value you. And in that, in that example, that TikTok example, they did not value. Him even at fair market rate. And so, yeah, so yeah, the value, I feel like that word value is you know, perhaps a critical marker in this conversation around what do you value?
What as an employer,
James: Well, one of the things we, Yeah, we’ve, we’ve talked a lot about this idea of trust and creating a safe space or psychological safety and how important those are to, you know, these kinds of conversations and this is, I think the other side to it as well, you know, just as you were talking about value is these are natural conflict points because you’ve got two people with two opposing views or.
With two positions that are not at the same spot and nobody really likes conflict. I mean, some people do, but not really like I can handle conflict with my mother, right? But I don’t think I really want to have conflict with my boss. Right. It’s just a totally different thing. Yeah. And and it’s like, it’s, I guess the, like one of the things I always wonder about is, is there a way for salary negotiations?
To be something that can be done in a psychologically safe way Where we can actually minimize the conflict while at the same time still creating space for both sides to be heard Right and for value to be communicated
Dee: Sure, I have lots of thoughts about that. But the I mean, I guess So we’re kind of talking about the why these things are so awkward But what are some of the steps then that we can take to make that less awkward is the first thing You Things like transparency in your, in your job ads, right?
Yeah. I mean, we, we, we’re, what are some of those, those steps in that direction that gets you to a point where there is less of that conflict or less of that dissonance between what I value and what I think I am valued at and what my employer. So do we, is that where we go? We go back to the start of acquisition, salaries, jobs.
James: Yeah, I think that’s a fair place to start, right? I mean, every new role starts with conversation or has to include a conversation around salary. Whether that’s you accepting the first job. Offer of a company when they send it to you which i’ve always done can I be honest with you like people have talked about negotiating it, but I’ve always felt really weird about doing that.
So i’ve always said yes to whatever whatever has been thrown at me I don’t know if anyone should hear that if they’re ever going to try to hire me, but you know, but I think too like part part of of Maybe for you and I I don’t want to say we’re old but like We’re further along the, the hiring journey or the work journey than people who are maybe starting out now.
But when we started, we didn’t have salary benchmarking. We didn’t have access to, you know industry pay scales or anything like that. There were no bands. That gave us a bottom and a top for range for a salary. We just sort of walked in and they, and, and they told us what the pay was going to be and we either took it or not.
And that, and, and. And so I think for, for people who are in the job market now, there’s a lot more tooling that’s just generally available for them to be able to actually know their value and know their worth before they even start or know where they can position themselves in order to be competitive.
Right.
Dee: Yeah. So it’s the first thing you do, right. When you’re looking for a job, what is, if you’re thinking what am I actually expecting to actually know what’s out there? So where do you go looking? Where do you go looking? You’ve been looking more
James: recently than
Dee: me.
James: Well, I think it’s good to note that, you know, in the world of, of work the law is starting to catch up a little bit.
So a salary benchmarking is becoming a thing where I’m based in Ontario, Canada either this year or next year, we’re getting a new law introduced, but that’s going to require every job ad for a role to have a salary band, right? It needs to have. A bottom and a top, right? Or, or some number. To give people a sense.
And that’s for a variety of reasons. I think diversity, equity, inclusion is the big reason we want to see equitable salaries, regardless of gender, race, you know, age all of those kinds of things. And so that’s really valuable. But then of course, there’s just sites like last door where you can go and you can plug in a title or pay scale where you can plug in a title and get a sense of what’s going on for your location.
See a lot of that coming out now where companies are are. Sort of like sticking salaries to specific locations. So like if you’re in San Francisco or you’re in New York they might have different salary bands based on the cost of living in those places. And then like a third tier, which is everybody else, which kind of sucks for me personally.
I’m like, well, why wouldn’t you pay me the San Francisco rate? Like that’s like a hundred grand more than what you’re looking at over here. And literally it could be a hundred grand. Like it’s just that insane of a spread. But yes, those are the things Find have colleagues or friends who are in the space I wouldn’t necessarily ask their salary, but I might ask, you know What are average salaries or the salary bands in your workplace?
Dee: It’s not weird that that sense of I mean, I guess it’s that one of those dinner table conversations you just don’t talk about money, but it’s but that whole thing of I wasn’t sure I could talk to my friends about what my salary is I’m not usually that weird about it like I’ve been pretty I’m not going to disclose it here But you know in some of my conversations with my mates that I’m like pretty upfront about it.
Yeah, it’s interesting It’s just I mean, that’s a whole other dynamic. That’s a psychological podcast Why is that a thing rather than a podcast about going to work? But
James: you know, I think I do think it’s connected though because there is And maybe it’s a Western thing. Maybe it’s, maybe it’s not something that other cultures experience, but at least, you know, in Western society, we don’t talk about our salaries with our friends.
Like I would not disclose my salary to my friends, particularly maybe because I just don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable. If I think my salary is going to be higher or create. a weird situation where They know I make more than them and so they might feel inclined to Hit me up for money if they think you know, like
Dee: hey, I know who I could go to for a loan
James: Yeah, exactly like those kinds of things, you know, it’s
Dee: weird, isn’t it?
James: Yeah
Dee: So the salary, we, I’m in Victoria in Australia, we are not far behind you in that salary transparency thing. However, there’s a, there’s a benchmark where it doesn’t kick in until the company that’s employing you has over a hundred employees, at least as far as I understand it. So that’s great. But if you’re in a WordPress agency of five people that you’re.
You’re not going to see that necessarily, or you’re not going to be compelled to see that. To be honest, in the, in the years, in recent years, when I’ve been job hunting, I very, I hesitate to apply to something that doesn’t advertise the salary.
James: I’ve, it’s funny that you say that, I, I’m, I think I would be in the same boat.
It’s like a red https: otter. ai
Dee: Yeah,
James: right.
Dee: Yeah
James: in the culture and that’s a big deal. Well, why wouldn’t you just post it? It’s not like i’m not going to find out right? Why would you hold that back? but you know, it’s funny that you say that though because I can remember like I did a a number of years ago, I did a interviews at shopify I was looking to get in there and We didn’t like you just didn’t talk about salary until like the third or fourth round.
So you’ve already invested You Hours and hours and hours of time into this interview process before anybody even starts talking to you about salary, right?
Dee: I’ve been on the other side of that conversation where we didn’t advertise salary. We posted the ad. We had somebody that get down to the interview process and within two minutes in that interview, I knew there was just no way we were going to meet his salary obligations.
And then I was in that awkward position. I should have just said there and then. Look, I’m pretty confident that we’re not going to meet it. And I’m not sure that we need to waste this hour of your time, but I wasn’t confident enough in myself at that point to say that. So we interviewed him and within about half an hour he’d figured it out and we ended the interview.
But I was like, if only we’d kind of post that, I wouldn’t have. You know, even, even, even in asking one of the other things that I’ve been, we’ve done before when we were hiring was we had a, a box at the bottom of the form, fill in all of the, you know, fill in all your application, but then we had a box that says, what are your salary expectations?
Lots of people didn’t actually fill that in, but yeah, it also is another thing that kind of weeded people out if they’re. The expectations were way higher. I’m not sure that that’s a fair way of waiting things out personally, but
James: I, yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because like, if you write down your salary expectations, The question is always, well, what if I’m way off?
What if I’m way over, but I really want the role or really want to work in that company, right? Are you shooting yourself in the foot? And then you’re like, well, I’ll take less, but then you’re actually starting out in a situation where you’re unhappy because you feel like you under valued yourself and you’ve actually got to work to build that back up over time.
Dee: Right. Exactly.
James: Well, let’s flip it a little bit. So we’ve talked a lot about the individual contributor side. We’ve talked about, you know, the hiring, but there’s another side to salary conversations, and that’s when you’re in the position and you’ve been around for six months, you’ve been around for a year, the company’s doing their annual performance reviews or their annual salary reviews.
And it’s your turn to sit in with your hiring manager or your manager, your people lead and have that conversation.
Dee: Well, funny you should say that because I initiated that conversation this week. So I, I know, right? You want a story? I mean, I, I mean, I’ve been in the, so I bring the dynamic as, as a woman in tech and, Over the years have kind of learned to advocate for myself.
It’s taken a while. I’ve been with the company that I’m with for a year and in my head, and again, for the company that I’d come with pre from previously, we had a, we had a whole documented process about what salary reviews look like. Yeah. Every year you would be up for an inflationary review. And then on, I think it was every other year at different points through the pandemic, You know, your career with them, you would have a performance review and you may, you may, you would get a raise every year, but you may get an inflationary run or you may get a performance related one.
And you know, there was quite possibly a difference between what the two of them look like. Anyway, all of that to say, I have that in the back of my mind of how things probably could work quite well. And, Been my anniversary has just clicked over in the role that I’m in. And so I’m like, Oh, I wonder what happens around here.
And so I did a search of my contract, no mention, did a search of the documentation in the, in the company, no mention. And so I thought, well, I’m going to make that mention. And so I reached out to my manager and said, so I put my, just kind of curious about what the process is. Oh, well, we would normally do that in the middle, at the beginning of the financial year when you’re, when you’re know, we, your performance review.
And I says, well, that’s kind of 18 months from when I’ve started. I’m not completely comfortable with that. And then, and, and I said, and I’ve also put my salary into a calculator that shows how much inflation has affected my salary over the last 12 months, and I was a little bit startled. So can we talk about it?
And she said, yeah, we’re, you know, we’re not uncomfortable making exceptions. I can take that conversation to the leadership team, which is Which is great. I’m still waiting for a response about kind of what’s, what’s going to happen there. But I think too, when, when we say it’s difficult, like I said, I feel like this is an awkward conversation.
And and her response was, well, it’s not awkward for me. It’s not my money. I’m like, I love, I kind of love that. And I’m sure if she’s ever listening to this, this podcast I may regret having, you know, but I, it was. It’s so important and I think it’s so important too, especially for those of us in you know, with, without the privilege of that, you know, building up to actually having those conversations is, is really important.
So I hope that next time we have a conversation about this, I can say to you, well, I got my inflationary pay rise, but I feel like it’s really, I think the thing that the takeaway for this for me is it’s really important for companies to have a plan. Yeah. You know, and to be transparent about the plan so that when you’re going in, even if you’re at the interview process, you can ask the question, well, what is the plan for salary review?
How does it actually look? And if it’s loose, then that’s a red flag for me as well, potentially. I didn’t have that conversation a year ago. I don’t regret that. I, well, I, I wish I had had that conversation. It is interesting conversation.
James: It’s, you know, like, because it’s almost like one of these things where, you know, as your leadership team and as your company matures and, you know, in WordPress in particular, this, this is probably a little bit looser because our teams are smaller and we tend to be more output focused or task oriented.
It’s harder to take time. To work on the business, but you know, like we also talk about how leadership is proactive, right? It’s being intentional. It’s doing things on purpose. And if we as leaders in our companies and in our organizations can make salary conversations, something that happened on purpose, it can remove some of that worry or fear or lack of safety.
Like, like you’re talking about, you didn’t, you couldn’t find any documentation. Well, that sucks. Like that just sucks because you, you’re totally on your own on an island wondering what’s my first step. You don’t even know what your first step is. Right.
Dee: And, and for the most part, like no, few employers are going to say, these been here for a year.
We should raise your pay, but you know, My experience has been in the past is that nobody else really thinks about that except you, unless there is a documented process and there is a plan so that people actually know what’s going on. So yeah. So it’s interesting to have to be the one initiating that conversation as the contributor rather than the manager.
James: And why that is, I think is also interesting too, because oftentimes the manager, like the people leader, We’ll actually have budget oversight of salaries as well as operational budget. And I wonder if part of this conversation is around, we talked about this a little, a little while ago when we were sort of figuring out what we’re going to talk about, but this idea of changing the KPIs, right.
Or changing how, how that’s rewarded. Like if an organized, like. If an organization has a budgeted a certain amount for salary and. A manager comes in and says, well, I can get that same resource for half the price. I mean, let’s, first of all, there’s a ton of wrong with that, but
Dee: I’m sorry. I got stuck on resource.
James: Sorry. That’s, I don’t know.
Dee: I know, I know. I get it. It’s totally common language. And I don’t know if there’s a
James: right or wrong word for that, you know, like, you know, headcount. Do you want me to use headcount? Right. Like, I don’t know that there’s a you know, full time hours yeah, whatever it is, like you have this budget and you have these roles to fill and.
If a manager feels like they are going to be rewarded for reducing the amount of But of of salary budget that they use for their headcount again for lack of better terms Yeah, yeah,
Dee: he can say results. I’m not gonna freak out. But yeah, no, I know what you’re saying
James: then That’s creating That starts that conversation in the wrong spot, I think.
Or that’s a culture opportunity for some fixing. And if we can make the KPI how much of their salary budget were they able to spend and change, you know, like, hey, not only did we hit our salary expectations, everyone’s getting paid. Around what we expect them to be paid based on the, the, the budget that we’ve set, but also start to, you know, like make those performance KPIs or, or the ROI of, of that salary spend higher.
I think that’s going to be better. Cause I would much, I think when you pay somebody more, maybe this is just my wishful thinking. When you pay somebody more than what they expect for the role, they work hard. Right? When people feel like they’re being paid equitably for the work that they do, they’ll work for it.
Right? And they’ll come to work and they’ll be energized and they won’t grumble and there’ll be a lot less disengagement. So, I don’t know. Maybe that’s my wishful thinking. I don’t know. But, yeah.
Dee: Here’s a question for you. I inflation and how that, you know, thinking about my, you know, putting my, what my salary has devalued by over the course of the 12 months.
If you’re in a, you know, running a business, And you’re raising your prices to account for inflation. Do you automatically raise your salaries for inflation as well? I feel like if you’re raising your prices for inflation, you have to expect that your salaries are going up for inflation. That’s why you’re raising your prices because your costs are going up.
So, so, so, yeah, I guess the, the question behind that question is should employers just go, well, we’ve just raised our prices. We should also raise our salary again. You know, employees aren’t going to naturally, the first thing they’re going to go is, Oh yeah, let’s spend money. I don’t know. I would love it if it was that straightforward.
Oh, we’ve raising our prices. So I’m going to put the salaries out. I’m not running a business. I don’t have to, you know, figure that out.
James: There is, there is that, I guess the way I look at it too, is where, you know, I’ve worked in different companies and in different situations and there’s revenue, there’s expenses, there’s.
Profit and there’s operating profit, right? And that operating profit number is often just a percentage, right? So when they look at salary expense or they look at, you know, overhead for, for tooling or, or whatever the number that I S I’ve seen, some companies emphasize is, well, we want to maintain, you know, 20 percent operating profit and of that 20 percent operating profit, right?
We allocate X number of dollars as profit share. We allocate X number of dollars as dividends to shareholders, whatever that looks like. Right. But that operating profit as a percentage becomes the important number. So if our revenue goes up by X percent we increase our operating profit by X percent.
But if that’s. It just depends on your company too. Some might see that as a win, but if your goal is to maintain an operating profit of 20%, let’s say, and your price rise results in a 25 or 28 percent increase, you know, yeah, that has other implications on taxes on all these other things. And so you, you actually might.
Be more inclined to do salary increases in order to maintain that operating profit. So that as you’re forecasting your tax spend, right, you’re not negatively impacting. Cause maybe that pushes you into a different threshold, right? Like there’s all those kinds of considerations. That
Dee: never even occurred to me.
This is, this is why I don’t run a business. Yeah. Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.
James: So I, from my perspective, you know, proactive organizations are ones that are looking at those numbers and going, okay, yeah, you know, operating profit is where, you know, at this band we want to live in. So if we raise prices, we’re doing that because we have X number of dollars.
We want to invest in maybe new technology or new product development or whatever that results in new hires or whatever, so that they could do it that way. Or your existing team, existing team and existing salary is where you look for that, that increase. But yeah, so that’s, that’s just one side of it.
But so on the, on the inflation side, that’s where I think that fits. I do think you know, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve sort of been floating around this, this conversation a little bit, but to bring it back like as managers going into these conversations If you own your budget and you own the salary, I think it’s important for you as a leader as well, to be proactive and thinking about your team and thinking about salaries.
I can remember some situations where, you know, like I’m looking at the salaries of my team members and HR has helpfully provided. The current salaries and then they will run their own benchmarking, right? To let you know where they, where, where people are at and will proactively do an increase for somebody on your team.
Because they’re not no longer at fair market value or, you know, they’ve discovered in a benchmarking exercise that somebody is underpaid, right. And they’ll adjust it that way. And then from there, they give you some wiggle room and say, you’ve got up to 3 percent or up to 5 percent to play with.
And, you know, 2 percent is inflation and the other one to 5 percent or one to 3 percent is performance. And go from there. So I’ve had that happen to me.
Dee: Right.
James: But
Dee: cool.
Yeah. I I’m just trying to think kind of, I think we, I think in my last role, when I was actually management rather than individual contributor, which is what I am now, that the, we, we had it a little bit differently in that we were in the process of fact, we did actually kind of get to the point where we had a whole progression framework and we were mapping.
Where people’s roles, I mean, we weren’t at a place at that point where everybody neatly fit in because they’d been different conversations had and different negotiations had throughout the years. But we were moving closer to that point where you could see the matrix of, you know, what progression looked like for the role that you were in, and then you could also see.
Horizontally, where the salary or where the salaries would fit wasn’t necessarily horizontal, but where the salaries would fit across that, and that was really helpful from, again, that transparency point of view of you kind of knew, well, I’m going to fit within this box as a manager, we knew where people should expect to be if they were it.
Overperforming, you could certainly tell by measuring against that matrix and, and could, you know, negotiate salaries on that perspective. And I found that really, found that really helpful. And I guess it all, again, my favorite word, you know, in this whole space is transparency. And so that, that, Getting to a point where that’s possible is a long road, particularly when you’ve got a lot of staff and you’re, you know, trying to lever people into kind of those, those benchmarks, but that was certainly really helpful.
James: I think to transparency is good, but you also like Part of it is you are responsible for your own destiny. And so while there is a role that your, your team lead and your company plays in, you know, facilitating safety, you’re not always going to have ideal conditions. And for you as an individual, you at some point have to make a choice.
Either you’re going to be comfortable with letting your company take the lead on these conversations. Or you are going to figure out how to get comfortable having these conversations yourself or leading that process as a journey. Everyone goes on. I don’t expect your average 20 to 22 year old. To be confident or willing to engage in those conversations.
Maybe this latest generation, because, you know, they’re full. I was going to say,
Dee: yeah, that, that may definitely have a generational spin on it, if I, if what I hear is correct. It’s
James: so funny, I feel like I’ve come full circle because I remember being that generation, right? Growing up and having people look down on me or whatever and there’s always something and now here I am Looking at the next generation It’s all the same it’s cyclical we all do it to each other but You know, that, that confidence there’s, there’s bravado, right?
But there’s confidence as well in knowing your worth. And I think confidence in knowing your worth does come with time and experience. And and being willing to just go, okay. The worst thing that can happen if you are having a salary conversation in an environment where at least they’re, they’re having them is that they say no.
Dee: Right.
James: And if they say no, you’re no worse off than you were before the conversation, except that you now have experience and you probably now have a sense of what they’re looking for or what they evaluate. So the next time you go to have that conversation, you can, you can be aligning your work or yourself or, or your, your output or your, your outcomes around whatever it is that they’re evaluating right in the criteria they have.
Sometimes it’s not in your control. Sometimes it’s financial. If we just don’t have money for pay rises this year or we didn’t perform as a company to where we want it to be. Those hits come to the challenge. I think we have is everyone talks about the economy right now being like tough yet. We’re still churning out hundreds of thousands of jobs every quarter.
Right. Profitability of companies is still as high or higher than it has been. And then, you know, yeah, there’s layoffs and there’s all that kind of stuff, but we got this, I think you can still win.
Dee: Yeah.
So how do you, well, I don’t know, maybe this is a conversation for another podcast, but that sense of how do you go into that conversation knowing your value?
James: Well, it’s a great segue actually into maybe this, you know, we’ve been trying to do this like little, you know, separate sections or something, but Some tooling maybe we can talk about or places to go to, to figure out your worth.
We mentioned it earlier in the chat, but like payscale. com is a great spot. Glassdoor. com has it as well. What you want to really be doing is looking for or using terms like. Salary benchmarking in, in a Google search and see what comes up for your region, because there’s probably some, some sites like that pay scale.
I, I actually tested this out last week, I think I went to pay scale and you can, you can benchmark up to five roles. And typically they ask you to plug in a salary. To get to, to find out where, where that salary would sit in terms of the, the median or the low end or the high end. And they ask you questions like where you’re based how many years of experience you have, all these questions that are helpful for you as far as like trying to figure things out.
So yeah, I would encourage people to try that, that kind of stuff out and see see what happens there. And, and another source I think is just job ads so like type in your, your, the, the, the role that you have or the role that you’re applying for and see what comes up in jurisdictions where they’re hiring for those roles and that can give you a salary band as well, even if the role that you’re looking at doesn’t have one.
Dee: That makes sense. I won’t lie. I’m sitting here typing mine into payscale. com because I’ve never heard it before, but I’ve had a point where I have to put in more data than I can while I’m talking to you. So I’m going to have to save that for after we’re done.
James: I did. Yeah. I think
Dee: that’s.
James: No, go ahead.
Dee: No, go ahead.
No, I’ve lost my train of thought. No. No, you go. I got lost in the middle there.
James: I was just going to, I think I lost my train of thought as well, but just when it comes to like salaries and, and all of that kind of stuff yeah, you’ve got to. You’ve got to own it. Oh, it was inflation, right? Like, and, and consider it inflation.
Another meme or not meme, but just like story on Tik TOK that I’ve seen. Is this woman and she’s talking about salaries. She says, if, if you’re not generating 10 to 15% of an increase in your income, every one to two years, then you need to move on, whether that’s moving into a new role or moving to a new company.
I thought that was pretty bold, but at the same time, that’s what the great resignation showed us. That people were willing, we’re, we’re being undervalued. The loyalty actually was penalized rather than rewarded. What a flip of the script for those of us in work, right? Who work in companies, work in salaried roles.
Like I like, sure. There’s the guarantee quote unquote guarantee, right. Of your role. But if, if. You know, you’re walking alongside someone and they’re making flips every one to two years and their salary is going Growing by ten to fifteen percent. Yeah, five to ten years down the road. They’re making a hundred percent more than you Yeah, 100 percent more than you.
Like it’s unreal to me. And I think for, you know, you want to talk about the business case for salary conversations and having a transparent culture and having openness around it. If you want to keep your people for longer than one to two years. You better have figured out how to increase your salaries and nobody wants to no employer wants to have a hundred percent Salary growth after ten years like that just seems ridiculous, right but figure something out, right?
Yeah, so that your team is is not on the lookout running away every two years because that’s just as expensive
Dee: Yeah, for sure for sure
James: Well, maybe we should end it here. I think that’s that’s a pretty good round. I mean these conversations I would love to say that they’re always helpful and they’re always insightful.
We’ve always got lots of stuff to take away I think for those who are listening Maybe this is just a conversation around Salar that that starts something for you or stirs Something for you and I’ll count that as a win but understand your value, do your homework, right? Take the lead in your own salary conversations, if you can and you’re confident to do that.
And even if you’re not try to grow confidence to do that. Any other thoughts, final thoughts from you on this?
Dee: Yeah. I think the kind of thing that we didn’t really cover is that sense of know your value in terms of what’s out there in the market. No, but also go into those salary conversations, knowing what your limits are and where the line is for you.
This isn’t to say necessarily that you have that conversation with the person that you’re negotiating with, but if you go in there and the, you know, everything that you are met with a blank wall, at least go, when you come away from that, You can either just suck it up and go, Oh, well, that’s how it’s going to be, or go, actually, that’s not enough.
I need to do something else. So I think for me going in also knowing where the line is for me is, is kind of important because you know, to what extent you’re prepared to push in that conversation and, and you know what you have to do when you come out of it. I think that’s helpful. And that that isn’t to say that you’re bonded to that because I go I could change my mind But I I often feel like going in there going.
Okay. So where is the line for me? What am I prepared to? Bend for or not bend for
James: well on that note go out and conquer. I don’t know Go good luck go get
Dee: a raise
James: Yeah, it’s it’s not easy if you are somebody who struggles with it. Welcome to the club. You are not alone It is not easy to do and yeah, we’ll just keep having these conversations and hopefully as you listen and learn if you are a leader in your organization or people leader, do everything you can to help your people have these conversations as easily as possible and as psychologically safe as possible.
And that’s the best thing you can do for your team.
Dee: Beautiful.
James: Awesome. Thanks everyone. If you have not yet like this subscribe to this, whatever the thing is to show us that you’re here, we’d love a comment or two about this content. If you have any questions, let us know. At some point we’ll start answering them.
I don’t know when, but we’ll, we’ll be having fun with it anyway. Thank you very much, everyone.