If you’re a graduate who has been in your first job for a while and wish you were being paid more, here’s how to get it: increase your productivity.
It’s common sense that getting more money on the job must go hand in hand with increased productivity. After all, you wouldn’t expect your employer to pay you more money for the same amount of work that you’ve been doing at your current salary. You should therefore focus your efforts to increase the quantity and quality of the work you put out to justify a raise in pay and/or responsibilities while on the job.
Below are a few tips on how you can increase your overall productivity to impress management and show them that you deserve to be compensated more handsomely.
Before we start, if you are considering asking for your first pay rise as a graduate, get in touch with us. We can help you to successfully get a pay rise.
1: Manage Your Time
Nothing bogs down productivity like spending unneeded time in meetings, travel, and phone calls.
Your time is extremely valuable to your employer, show them that you know when it’s time to network, and when it’s time to get your hands dirty and do the work they put in front of you.
Make sure that you focus a majority of your time on your core tasks. If it is possible to miss certain meetings, try to get a bulleted list of action points, important topics or changes, so that you can stay in the loop, but also stay productive on the job.
2: Make and Complete to-do Lists
There are usually two types of tasks that we complete, complex or simple tasks. To maximize your time and productivity you should focus on tasks that are easily completed first, and then move on to more complex tasks that will take larger portions of your time.
Don’t forget, completing small tasks also gives us a sense of accomplishment as they are going through the workday, and can help motivate you to push yourself harder to complete assignments and tasks. Of course, priority tasks should be completed as soon as possible. You can also break down larger tasks into smaller portions.
3: Put a Timer on Jobs and Tasks
It’s so easy to get sucked into complex work that eats up time and effort. Time blocking can really help to boost your productivity.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
Parkinson’s law
Is Parkinson’s law slowng you down?
When you decide that you’re going to spend a specific amount of time on a given task and then walk away, you leave yourself time to complete other jobs and assignments, while still staying productive on those larger tasks. This works out great when dealing with supervisors that like constant updates on the progress of your work.
Rather than telling them, you are “working on it” and then submitting your work right when it is due, you can give progress reports to your supervisor. This also allows you to address individual issues that might come up during the process of completing your assignment.
4: Remove Distractions
One of the biggest killers of productivity is mismanaging your work time with things like non-work-related social media and phone calls?
They can take your eyes off the prize. You will quickly see that you fall behind significantly less when you focus on your professional life at work and your social life when you have completed your assigned tasks.
5: Go Over and Above
You will quickly get noticed if you go a bit further in the delivery of tasks you are asked to complete, so do that little bit extra.
It may be digging deeper to find out extra information for a manager or customer or taking a bit more time over the presentation of work.
Here are 4 ways to go over and above at work.
6: Ask for Help
This may sound counterintuitive but asking for help and advice shows that you’re willing to learn from your peers and superiors, want to do the best job possible and know your limitations. It is perfectly acceptable to ask for help on larger projects.
Show your supervisors that you know how to utilize company resources and can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of your peers. You’ll find it takes half the time it would if you were to try to figure out a complicated query by yourself.
If you want to get a pay increase then the above tips will help increase your productivity, which in turn will show your employer that you are dedicated to doing the best job possible and that your output will increase your worth the bump in pay. If however, you feel as though you are stuck in a dead-end job, with little or no opportunities for progression, it might be time to look for a new job.
Essentially you have to say to your boss, look I have achieved this over the last year, this year I plan to increase my productive output in these ways by doing these things. Therefore I would like an X % real pay rise. You need to think like a boss! 😉
;)