Pay Raises and Salary Increases

People who ask for a pay raise are usually too focused on getting a bigger paycheck.  There are a lot of ways that you can earn a raise.  It doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of cash.  Open your mind a little and come up with some creative ways that you could drastically improve your career without having to necessarily increase your base salary.

I was talking with an acquaintance a couple months back.  The guy works as a purchasing agent for a fortune 500 company.  He has been a loyal employee of this company for about eight years.  His line of work isn’t something that companies would have a hard time finding applicants for.  These types of jobs are common and don’t necessarily require an advanced education.

This man was telling me how he had just made some changes in his work environment.  The whole time he was telling this story, he had a giant grin on his face.  He normally spends just over an hour commuting to work every day.  He lives a long ways from the office and traffic is pretty heavy.

Recently, he was speaking with his superiors about the environment he works in and how it could be improved.  His management team agreed to set him up with an office at home.  They sent their IT guys out to his house and installed a company computer and company telephone with remote access into the company’s main computer system.

Now for two days every week, instead of spending more than two hours on the road driving back and forth to the office, he is working from home in his home office.  He can perform 99% of his job right from home.  There is no need for him to make that trip every day.

You can bet that if this scenario works out, he will probably be able to increase the number of days he works from home to three or four.  That is what I call a major benefits upgrade.  Wouldn’t you?

Not all pay raises have to come in the form of more cash.  Remember this guy’s story when you think about how to ask for a salary raise at work.  Maybe there is an alternative idea or two that would be the equivalent of getting an increase in pay without making the company write you a larger check every week.  This guy is now saving money on gas as well as wear and tear on his vehicles.  That is the same as if the company paid him that much extra every week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Work Environment, employee examples, employee stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.