Tag Archives: Benefits

How To Ask For More Money. Part II.

Posted in Benefits, Compensation, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Professional Development by

In a previous post, I laid out initial steps you should take to ask for a raise in How To Ask For More Money, Part I.

Without further ado, here are the final steps to being flush with cash.

How About Your Performance? 

Third, you need to do some self-reflection and be really honest with yourself. This can be the most difficult step. If you are going to ask your manager for a salary review with the end goal to increase your salary, you had better know for certain if you are a valued employee doing valuable work. You had better be able to answer the question that a manager won’t ask but will be thinking, “what have you done for me lately?” if you want your company to show you the money. If you don’t already have copies, ask your manager or HR for your performance reviews. Look over them, have you progressively improved year over year? Have you met your goals? Have you earned additional designations? Have you increased your skill set? Put yourself in your manager’s shoes, if you had several grand each year to award to an employee at your discretion, who gets it? The employee who meets expectations year-over-year but never challenges themselves and loves the comfort zone or the employee who exceeds expectations by sticking their neck out to lead a highly visible project and eagerly pursues developmental opportunities? Then the hard part, you have to consider the value of your position to the organization. If you work for the R&D department in a tech firm, your position is likely highly valued. If you are the clerical assistant in an engineering firm, your position is not that highly valued. If any one can replace you in your position with minimal training and the same work gets done and at the same level, you do not hold a valuable position. All jobs are not created equal.

Sizing Up Your Manager

After reconnaissance and self-reflection, now it’s time to size up your manager and your relationship with him or her. Is your relationship more formal or informal? How long have you been working for him or her? Is your manager a front-line supervisor or senior manager? Is your manager hands-on in his or her employee’s professional development? Does he or she freely give recognition? Does your manager really understand what you are doing? Not just your job description but what you are doing. The answers to all of these questions are going to guide how you approach your manager, how you request a salary review and increase and how much and what type of ammunition you need to build your case. Use your emotional intelligence to get into your manager’s shoes.

The Salary Discussion

Now that you have properly done your research and are ready to ask for a raise, schedule time with your manager and let them know ahead of time that you want to discuss your compensation. Be prepared for the meeting, bring your talking points and all of the data you have gathered. Once you have presented your request and argument, your manager may straight up say no or tell you they need to get back to you. You need to be prepared for either of those answers and anything in between. Whatever the outcome, let your manager know you appreciate their time in listening to you and considering your request. If you do not get a raise, leave the door open to have further discussion with your manager by asking what you can do to be considered for one in the future. If you do receive an increase, be thankful for what you get and continue to work your ass off.

Good luck to you and may the odds be ever in your favor. 

How To Ask For More Money. Part I.

Posted in Compensation, Employee Engagement, Employee Relations, Human Resources, Radical HR by

Feeling overworked and underpaid? Join the crowd. In a March 2016 article from Fortune, only a little more than 1/3rd of Americans feel they are paid fairly. As an HR Representative counseling employees, I often hear a multitude of reasons why people are unhappy to some degree with their salary. From the perception to being “on-call” all of the time, to doing more than what their manager realizes to just plain feeling undervalued, employees are starting to wonder how to take steps to ask for more money.

Before you barge into your manager’s office demanding more money with little to know argument to back up your request, which never works out well for anyone, I strongly urge you to do the following.

Do your recon.

First, you need to do a little reconnaissance. Schedule a meeting with your Human Resources department and tell them you want to discuss your compensation. You need to find out if the company has a compensation philosophy,  does the organization tend to pay above market, do they pay to meet market averages or do they lag the market? A lot of companies right now are opting to pay median salaries, giving raises each year that just beat cost-of-living inflation, while awarding performance with discretionary bonuses. This is a less riskier option for companies than awarding high salaries in a ever-changing economy that can render a business obsolete in 6 months. Ask HR how the company recognizes performance. You also have to consider how your company is doing overall and where your company is in its life-cycle. If your company is in start-up or decline mode, they likely do not have the capital to be throwing around on employee raises. As the old saying goes, you can’t get blood out of a turnip. Other questions that are helpful to ask are if your company assigns salary ranges to each position and where your position lies on a career track (junior, mid-level, senior-level). Also ask your friendly HR professional for his or her recommendation on how to approach a salary review or request inside of your organization. Any HR practitioner worth their salt, will be able to give you an honest response. If your HR rep is squeamish about your questions, that may be a red flag that your company has an old-school mentality around compensation transparency which still isn’t all that unusual to encounter these days. Yet, it’s good to know this about your company.

External Research.

Next, you also need to do some external market research. You need to hit the internet and find out what data is available on salary ranges for your position, think payscale.com, glassdoor.com and onetonline.org. But heed caution here and build in a margin of error. These websites usually cite self-reported data and individuals usually inflate their salaries when asked. Additionally, these sites do not take into account certain nuances that make an apples-t0-apples comparison very difficult- different geographical regions, international versus regional organizations, successful versus declining companies, and booming industries versus dying industries. You may also want to reach out to recruiters in your area or network and ask them what they see is the going rate for your position. But, proceed with caution for the same reasons stated above. Also, don’t forget the monetary value of your benefits. The company probably pays for a portion of your health insurance and matches your 401(k), even though this isn’t money deposited in the bank every 2 weeks, doesn’t mean it isn’t compensation. You need to figure out the value of your benefits as part of your total compensation to understand what you are truly being paid to do your job. Now, with this information, you can create an acceptable range of what you think your position is worth.

 

 

Once you have done all of this stuff, you are ready to put your plan into play. Tune in on Thursday for How To Ask For More Money, Part II.

 

Trump and the ACA

Posted in Benefits, Employee Relations, Public Policy, Radical HR, Wellness, Workplace by

Hold on to your hats people. All the stuff you learned to do to implement the ACA will be methodically undone. And that’s if we are to believe Trump’s campaign rhetoric. For some of you, okay most of you HR folk, this will be a blessing because we all know that implementing this hot mess of a thing was stressful.

To recap, all of this started in 2010 with the passage of Obamacare as our GOP friends have so endearingly referred to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The very utopian goal of the ACA was to provide access to affordable and quality health care coverage to all Americans regardless of age, income or previous health conditions, reduce the number of uninsured Americans and reduce healthcare costs overall. And then congress got ahold of it and made the ACA’s actual mechanics more complex  and nebulous than the instructions of a shitty piece of Ikea furniture.

The ACA eliminated lifetime maximums, eliminated denials of health care coverage due to pre-existing conditions, put limits on annual out-of-pocket maximums, raised the age to 26 for covered dependents and mandated free, no-cost preventive health exams amongst other things. The Individual Mandate of the ACA requires individuals and their families, with some limited exceptions, to have minimal health coverage or incur a penalty. To further this agenda, the ACA’s Employer Mandate required companies of a certain size to offer comprehensive, affordable group health insurance to covered employees.

It’s no secret that the GOP hates Obamacare and decries it as a symptom of a socialist government. Republicans have alleged that the program would actually increase health costs and result in death panels, whereby government bureaucrats would actually decide the life or death fate of those considered uninsurable.  The GOP painted a picture of the ACA as the final nail in the coffin of small businesses in the U.S., another example of over-regulation of business and yet another obstacle to free enterprise.

And even when the GOP was too busy dragging their feet in protest to just about everything the Obama Administration attempted to do in the last 8 years, they pledged to find a sliver of time to offer an alternative plan to the ACA. But hence, it was not meant to be, as we sit here today, they have not presented their alternative. And that is why Trump is in a world of shit now trying to figure out how to dismantle this thing while somehow safeguarding the millions of Americans who are now insured on the health care exchanges made possible by the ACA.

 

Here is what I think.

Don’t hold your breath. This thing is gonna take a lot of time to figure out. What was built in the past 6 years can’t be undone in one year. Trump states he will repeal and replace Obamacare. With upwards of 20 million Americans in jeopardy of losing coverage with the repeal of the ACA, I think Trump would have to think twice about pulling the rug out from under that many people.

I think the individual mandate is dead. No longer will all Americans be required to have health insurance and no longer will individuals who opt-out have to pay penalties. I think this is likely to be one of the areas of the ACA that is repealed quickly. Thus no more 1095 administration.

I think the employer mandate is dead. However, many medium to larger size companies had comprehensive and affordable coverage long before the ACA as a means to attract employees. For those companies, this won’t cause much ripple. For smallish companies that did implement a health care plan- they will have to decide to keep it to remain competitive in job market that is employee-driven.

Trump and the GOP are going to introduce some sort of Health Savings Account whereby companies are either required or strongly encouraged to make contributions. Ultimately this looks like a stipend that employers give to their employees to buy health insurance. They are also going to allow coverage to be sold across state lines which theoretically increases options and decreases premium costs.

Based on Trump’s 100 day plan, what’s clear is how fast he will act to repeal Obamacare. What’s not clear is what he will replace it with. And if I’m reading between the lines, I don’t get the warm and fuzzies that affordable, comprehensive health care coverage for all Americans is even a priority for Trump.  And this is scary because I am confident that healthcare costs will continue to rise, that the sick will get sicker and proper coverage will be out of their reach. But for someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who probably has the privilege of a personal physician available to meet him in his gilded tour at the onset of tummy ache, health care coverage for all just wouldn’t even register as a thing.

 

What Does HR Do?

Posted in HR Competencies, Lists, Top 10 Lists, Workplace by

Type this into Google, and you get 3,880, 000,000 results. Seems like HR does a lot. Let me break it down for you.images

  1. HR “keeps the lights on”- we process payroll, administer benefits enrollment, process direct deposits, answer 401k questions, reset your ADP password, interpret company policies for managers, walk employees through leaves of absence, fix employee PTO balances and gather acknowledgement forms.
  2. HR tries to create an environment where employees feel safe and secure. We make sure there are band aids, that staff is trained in first-aid, we take first reports of injury, we create policies around front-desk security, deliver discrimination and harassment prevention training and monitor the work environment for bullying or violations of standards of conduct.
  3. HR plans social activities, but we don’t like to. In companies, the job of potlucks, holiday parties, birthday celebrations, baby showers, pumpkin carving contests and all-hands meetings usually lands in the lap of HR. Not only does it suck but it totally erodes the value of what a good HR department can do for a company.
  4. HR creates brand strategies. We figure out the value of the organization and what it can provide, package that message and use it when attracting talent to the company.
  5. HR does not terminate employees. Managers do. When managers are not satisfied with an employee, they come to HR. HR asks a series of questions to investigate the issue, determine the cause and make recommendations. If one of those solutions is termination, HR further investigates to make sure the termination is not wrongful. HR may be in the room to witness the discussion, but we do not pull that trigger and we do not deliver that message.
  6. HR partners with management to determine talent needs and develops strategies to find that talent. This is an ongoing and continuously challenging responsibility.
  7. HR covers the companies’ ass. HR practitioners must stay on top of Federal and State Laws,  and County and City Ordinances, interpret the repercussions of those laws on the company and work environment and advise leadership accordingly.
  8. HR helps company leadership develop compensation philosophy. HR takes into account the companies’ financials, the organization’s mission, vision and values and makes recommendations on the company’s direct and indirect compensation and benefits package.
  9. HR mediates disputes in the workplace, disputes between employees, disputes between managers and employees, disputes between leadership and employees.
  10. HR does not deliver disciplinary warnings or performance discussions to employees. Again, these are a manager’s jobs. HR gets involved to help document issues, serve as a witness to the discussion or we get involved when the manager botches it.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but is just a sampling, if you will, of what HR does. For those who don’t know.