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.
I’ve just come back from Sri Lanka and it was fascinating looking at a country that has had significant colonial development and infrastructure in its history, but has recently been through 25 years of civil unrest. They appear to be a nation that is struggling with understanding how to build quality infrastructure.
People still live in tin sheds built by the British in the late 19th Century. The Galle Fort built by the Portuguese and the Dutch in the 16th and 17th Centuries withstood the Boxing Day tsunami, while the rest of Galle was washed away. Are we, as a global society losing the ability to design and build quality infrastructure?
The east coast of Australia is currently having the discussion regarding building a high speed rail line to connect Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, but the adversaries’ simple statement is, it is not economically feasible. When was it decided that infrastructures’ main role was to make a profit rather than support society?
When I look at Sri Lanka and the colonial infrastructure that is now 300-400 years old and is still in every day use, and I look at the infrastructure in Melbourne, for example the Monash freeway upgrade that is less than 5 years old, I wonder what is missing from our design process. We have a better understanding of the laws of nature, we have a better understanding of materials and how they react to the laws of nature, we have access to some fantastic synthetic materials, yet the Monash is already disintegrating in 3 places that I know of. In what state will it be in 25 years?
We designed and constructed the Melbourne Star, only to have it pulled down after the first summer due to structural flaws, what are we doing wrong?
The Romans build aqueducts, bridges and roads throughout their empire, how much profit did they make from these investments? Sure labour was cheap, but building 3,200 km of road in Britain alone is a massive undertaking. It was obviously about something more intangible than money. Maybe it was to ensure their army could always get to the front line and that supplies could be brought forward en masse. Maybe it was done in an attempt to pacify the locals. Maybe it was done as part of some ego power play to show all their rivals how big and important they were. Whatever the reason, the result was they built infrastructure that was quality to its core.
Sadly, I am not a discipline that understands the term quality. I am a computer systems engineer, and as I am sure we all accept, computers are constantly changing, upgrading and are generally unreliable. What is even sadder is that society has been conditioned to accept this poor performance, Microsoft has been key in generating this tolerance, while Apple attempted to fight against it. Is it our dependence on transient unreliable technology that has lead us to accepting the same standards in our infrastructure? Or that we are used to building something new every 6 months, so it does not occur to us to build something that will be viable in 50 years or 100 years.
I don’t have an answer as to the why, but I do know that we cannot continue down this path of short sightedness. We cannot continue to develop housing estates on flood plains simply because it hasn’t rained in 10 years, we cannot write off a mode of transport which could support nearly 80% of our population and freight needs because it costs a lot. We need to start thinking bigger picture, longer term, and look at the effect on society now and in the future.
Infrastructure is not about polls or elections, it’s about people!
I watched Metropolis, the 1927 sci-fi classic, last night, and it explored the concept of two classes of citizens trying to destroy each other, with the net result being they destroyed themselves. This is true in today’s world as well, we, the society needs the corporate world, we need stuff to be made and created, but equally they need us to need the stuff and that is why CSR is necessary, because without society there is no need for corporations. Metropolis had a wonderful tag line:
“There can be no understanding between the hands and the head unless the heart acts as mediator.”
As a young engineer keep it in mind when you are deciding where to put the road, or what chemicals to use in the production process.
If you have come here from my Chair report you will be aware that EA recently ran a workshop on corporate social responsibility (CSR). The YEA National Committee, representatives from EWB, YEA-V and EA staff attended a day workshop event facilitated by Net Balance Foundation to attempt to identify what CSR is, what it means to EA as an organisation, and what it means to our members and the profession.
As warfare has morphed over the past century, so has the concept of ‘corporation’. Where in WW1 it was all about trench warfare, finding something you were good at, and just sticking to it. In WW2 it became more about agility, pre-emptive reactions and surprise of the Panzer divisions, this then transitioned through the Vietnam era, where the guerrilla enemy was relatively unknown, their tactics a mystery and the only option was to remain as flexible as possible and react as quickly as possible. We are now in the 21st Century and the nature of the war we fight has changed again, we now exist in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Three block war’. No longer are soldiers heading out to kill a known enemy who lives in a trench across the field, they are walking streets with women, children, fathers and grandparents, of which any and all may be the enemy or equally none of them may be the enemy. A war is only as successful as the number of people that believe in it and hence it is critical a solider conquers the hearts and minds of the street.
The corporate world has also morphed through similar phases and is now at a point where the people of the streets have the information, knowledge and power to question the corporate world, and critically, the ability to take their money elsewhere (to the enemy).
It is a corporation’s responsibility to act in a way that society sees as fair, true and beneficial to the majority of the population, including the shareholders, however, they can do it for several reasons, people will like them and therefore buy more of their product, which is one end of the scale, all the way to the other end, which is, it’s the right thing to do. I will provide some examples.
Changing your processing plant so you produce less waste is beneficial to society, but people are unlikely to be aware of it, and it is unlike to affect their decision to do business with you, but it’s the right thing to do.
Giving work experience jobs to troubled teens that are dropping out of Year 9 and 10 will definitely cost you money, but there is a reasonable chance that these kids will straighten out and be contributing members of society. It is the right thing to do, and it might make your customers look fondly on you and buy more of your product.
You only supply paper bags to your shoppers and you charge a fee for their use. Customers will come to your shop, because they feel they are making a socially responsibly decision, but you are on charging the cost, and the driver is, it will make you money. The corporation is not being socially responsible; they are facilitating the end consumer to be socially responsible.
So what does it mean to you as a practicing engineer, who is a long way from owning their own company? Every action and decision you make has an effect on society, consider those effects:
When you are comfortable answering these questions, get your boss to start asking them and your peers, ask the simple question…So What?
Gamila MacRury
Chair YEA-V
Keep your eyes open for the discussion on the Generation Exchange Debate, topics will include:
