You have settled on the best month or couple of weeks in which to ask for your pay rise, promotion or whatever.

When is the right time to ask?

 Now the time has come to fix up a specific meeting with your boss. You might have been expecting to settle this whole thing over an informal chat or a drink together after work. But in fact you are far better off fixing up a formal meeting with the boss. The more professional format gives you several advantages:

• It signals that you are serious about this – you’re not just asking because it’s ‘worth a try’.
• It gives you the opportunity to make a proper presentation to your boss, laying out all the arguments in your favor carefully. This can be quite difficult in a crowded pub, and in any case feels uncomfortable in an informal setting.
• A formal meeting should mean dosed doors, phones diverted and no interruptions – far more conducive to getting your boss to focus on the subject.
• Your boss will set aside time for a formal meeting which they might not for an informal chat. This means they shouldn’t be constantly looking at their watch and itching to get off to their next appointment.
• A formal meeting gives you an excuse to jot down the key points made and copy it to your boss later (whereas it’s hardly common practice to minute your lunchtime trip to the pub).

So how are you going to ask? You may feel that your boss will resist the suggestion of a pay rise and that you don’t want to announce in advance that this is the reason you’d like to meet. You can perfectly well ask for a meeting in order to discuss your work and leave it at that. If they ask you for more detail, explain that you want to talk about your performance and perhaps mention that you want to review your overall compensation package. You certainly won’t need to be more specific than that.

Don’t Jump the Gun
It’s possible that your boss will agree to meet and will suggest a time in the next day or two – maybe their diary is full all next week and then they’re off on a conference. If you haven’t prepared your case fully yet, you’re going to be in trouble. So don’t ask for a meeting until you’re ready for it.

Know what your worth!

How far are you going to let your boss beat you down before you come out feeling like a loser? You have to go into this negotiation knowing what is the least you are prepared to settle for. Otherwise you may come out with nothing. It’s no good saying, ‘Can I have a pay rise please?’ and then, when your boss declines, saying, ‘Oh well, it was worth a try’, and leaving.

It’s up to you to decide what your bottom line is. Maybe your personal expenses have increased and you need to get a minimum pay rise to cover them. Or perhaps you simply feel that you don’t want to work for an organization that won’t recognize your worth. Maybe you want a bare minimum of a 20 per cent rise, or perhaps you’d settle for an undertaking to give you a rise in six months if you reach an agreed performance target. Your bottom line may be well below the figure you’re really aiming for, or it may be the same figure.

The important thing is to know your bottom line and then stick to it. And, of course, decide what you’ll do if your boss refuses even that much (although if you’re realistic, you’ve done your homework, you’re worth more than you’re paid and you negotiate competently, there’s no reason for your boss to refuse it). If you’re not ready to hold out for the bottom-line figure, there’s little point in negotiating. If you don’t hold firm you might as well just say ‘How about it?’ to your boss on the off-chance they up your salary without argument.

By the way, whatever you do, don’t give away what your bottom line is. ‘It’s for you to know and them to find out’, as they say. At least, let them think they’ve found out by beating you down to it. But if you’re canny, they won’t ever haggle you down that far. If your boss finds out what your bottom line is, they won’t stop until they’ve ground you down to it. So don’t let them find out until they reach it. At that point you can, if you wish, say ‘That’s my absolute bottom line’.

And don’t, whatever you do, cry wolf. If you insist you’ve reached your bottom line and then subsequently agree to drop below it, your boss will quite reasonably disbelieve you when you finally claim – truthfully – that yet another figure really is your bottom line. And if they don’t believe you, they’ll keep trying to batter you down and the pair of you may never reach an agreement that works for you both.

Leverage? What Leverage?
You might be thinking that you have nothing to negotiate with unless you’re prepared to hand in your notice. If you’re not, all your boss has to do is flatly refuse any rise, and that’s that. Not so. You’re here because you are worth more than you’re being paid. That extra value is your leverage. We’ve seen that threats don’t work, but you can always find other ways of phrasing the point you’re making. For example: ‘I feel I’m worth more than I’m earning because of all the extra hours I put in. If those extra hours weren’t going to be rewarded, I would have to ask myself why I work them.’ You’re not threatening to work to rule, but your boss can see that you have bargaining counters too.

What if you’re the only one who benefits?

All of this is all very well, but how are you going to come up with a valid reason why your boss will benefit from, say, giving you a better car-parking space? Some perks are clearly going to benefit you alone, but that doesn’t mean you’ve no right to them. Of course, sometimes the perk may not benefit the company, but you’re genuinely a special case. If you can demonstrate that you have a particular need for a perk, you may not need to show any benefit to your employer.

Take the parking space. Suppose you regularly give presentations – more often than anyone else – and two or three days a week you have to load and unload your car with OHPs and powerpoint equipment. This seems like a reasonable justification for having a dedicated parking space close to the entrance.

But what if you do no such thing, and you just don’t like having to walk 200 yards from your car to the entrance – whatever the weather – and back again each evening? We’re talking a straight perk here: no benefit to the company, no special case. Just a good old-fashioned perk. How are you going to justify that?

Perks Instead of Pay
The answer to this one is that you can trade off perks against added value. It’s really not worth asking for your parking space during the salary review and taking it in lieu of part of the pay rise. There’s no need to do that. So long as you increase your value to the organization constantly, you can ask for perks separately from your pay rise.

Suppose you asked for a pay rise three months ago and, since then, you’ve increased in value again? You know your boss isn’t going to agree to another pay rise so soon – they’re not that enlightened – but you can easily demonstrate that you are worth even more now than you were when the last rise was agreed. You’ve exceeded your targets and you’ve taken on yet more responsibilities than were planned back then.

So here’s what you do. Fix a meeting with your boss and go through a similar mini-presentation to last time. Agree the current situation, the reasons why it is already unrealistic again, and your proposed solution. But this time, your proposed solution is different. Tell your boss: ‘I feel another pay rise is more than justified here. However, I’m aware that it may be difficult for you to award a second pay rise so soon when you hadn’t budgeted for it. So I’d be prepared to compromise by finding rewards that don’t make demands on the budget at the moment. And if my value continues to increase at this rate – as I plan that it will – you’ll be able to build appropriate pay rises into the budget for next year instead.’

Now you’re cooking with gas. You knew damn well you weren’t going to get another pay rise (even though you really should). But instead of putting pressure on your boss, you’re letting them off lightly. All they have to do is give you a decent parking space and half a dozen extra leave days a year, for example, and you’ll leave them alone. (Until next year, when you’ve already forewarned them to expect a request for another well-earned pay rise.)