Situation 1:

You are a specialist working for Corpo-Mess, a famous international corporation that produces new software for a wide range of products, from self-navigating cars, through drones and robots, to intelligent medical devices. 

You are currently a member of one of the multiple teams working on a new model of a drone.

You are an excellent programmer, and you are involved in programming the navigation system for the machine.

You’ve been working at Corpo-Mess for three years now.

Initially, you agreed to a one-year traineeship here you felt undervalued as your starting salary was substantially lower than it used to be in your academic job.

You took this sacrifice though. You were working hard for a low salary for the whole year. Then, you were working in a few teams for another two years.

You worked hard, and you received a raise three times within that period.

Within the last year, you already received a raise twice, amounting to a total of 750 Eur extra compared to the previous year – as you were promoted from junior to senior team member. 

However, you also have an infant at home.

Even though you and your spouse both have a job, you feel that your financial needs as a family grew way beyond your budget.

Your spouse is pressing on you to ask for yet another raise; this is the only viable way to increase the home budget at the moment.

Regardless of your situation at home, you feel that you deserve a raise.

a) You are responsible for the core part of the code, and you integrate other team members’ work into one piece — which requires a command of a few operating systems and programming languages from you.

b) You feel that your work is more essential for the team’s success than your colleagues’ work, yet you are right in the middle of the pay scale within the 12-person team.

c) You not only write two times more lines of code than the average team member on your team but also, you often need to debug codes from your less experienced team members.

d) Last month, you spent at least 40% of your working time fixing the mistakes of three green fresh Master’s graduates who just joined the company and don’t have a grasp on the project just yet.

e) You were so busy with this that you did not have time even for a lunch or coffee break, not mentioning attending the social events within the company.

You are so busy with handling your newborn at home and babysitting your teammates at work that sometimes you wish you could leave everything for a week or two, or otherwise, you will get crazy.

For a long time, you cannot make up your mind to ask for this raise. But one morning, you finally decide to make a move and storm into your boss’ office.

Situation 2:

For the past 11 years, you have been working hard on developing your little biotech startup of 25 employees, Bio-Mess — together with your two co-founders.

The market is in crisis right now. Therefore, you are in bad financial condition. You hope that the new patent proposal you just filed at the patent office will give you the chance to start generating decent profits. 

You are scheduled for an appointment with one of your best employees, a laboratory worker who, judging from the context, expects the raise.

You are surprised to hear the news, as this employee already is the best-paid employee in the company.

You are afraid that any additional costs might ground your company right now, therefore, you are not fond of the idea of giving anyone a raise this year.

You might only do this if the employee seems to consider leaving or might have some other opportunities at hand — as you don’t want to lose this person.

In general, however, you prefer applying any cashless solutions than handing out money. For instance, you might consider the following options:

1. Adding the employee’s name to the list of authors on the next patent application that you are working on right now,
2. Giving the employee more free hand in proposing the next projects within the company,
3. Proposing that they can represent the company on some of the meetings with clients, and on conference presentations,
4. Giving the employee a new, better-sounding job position title even though the salary and the range of responsibilities stays the same,
5. Giving the employee a little pool of the company shares hedged for five years (e.g., 0.1% of the shares), with a purpose to bind them with the company. It is, however, a decision you cannot make on your own, without the involvement of your two co-founders.