The message a salary increase can send

Dear Bob …

Here is another corporate mystery: At my company, our jobs were evaluated for salary scales and my job’s pay bracket was increased by 25% which took my pay level from being at the top of my range to being at the bottom. When it came time for ‘merit increases’ I got a 3% raise.

Based on my salary range, I am now an inexperienced newbie at my job. What does this move tell me? It tells me that my company will gladly pay more to hire someone with my expertise to replace me than it will pay me to stay. It also says, maybe you should look around for other companies who would be willing to pay you for your expertise.

Is that what the company really intended?

– Suddenly inexperienced

Dear Inexperienced …

I’d bet a lot that somewhere, your company has one policy regarding how to compensate for a promotion and an entirely separate policy for how to compensate new hires.

Dumb, but common. Probably different people wrote them.

If you feel like it, and are confident you can do so without antagonizing anyone, you can always sit down with your manager and explain that as things stand the company has given you a strong economic incentive to look elsewhere, and that you’d like to avoid the temptation.

There is another way of looking at your situation, though. When you were at the top of your range the company couldn’t have given you a merit increase under any circumstances. That’s the problem with being at the top of a salary range. Now you have more headroom.

So there’s a different conversation you can have with your manager, and given the small increase you received it’s an important one to have: Why, when you’re at the bottom of your salary range, you received such a small increase.

Your manager might consider your performance to be somewhere between marginal and just adequate without taking the time to let you know. And if not, it’s probably a good idea to explain that this is the message a 3% increase sends, regardless of what was intended.

– Bob

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