To ask for a pay rise?

[Callmepale]

I was promoted to manage my team of 40, 5 months ago. I joined the 4 other long serving line managers and am enjoying the role.

We have a pay banding structure much like the NHS. As I was only doing my lower band job for 3 years, I was somewhere in the middle of the band. Now I've been promoted, I'm at the bottom of the higher band.

My problem is that many of the people I manage are long serving members of staff and due to the overlapping in bands, we are paid the exact same to the penny.

While I appreciate longevity of these members of staff, my responsibilities are so completely different.

Their role is customer service/lightly admin based and they do a brilliant job. I am now responsible for dealing with their feedback, implementing new procedures, authorising holiday requests, managing several smaller sub groups, performing absence reviews, supervising projects and many other leadership tasks.

Is it fair that I am being paid the same despite the large disparity in responsibilities? Am I being unreasonable to ask for a pay rise? I've just missed the annual increment increase of pay having only been in this role for 5 months. I explained recently how I felt about this in a discussion with my manager. We won't see each other now for a few weeks due to various leave/conferences/diaries not matching up. If she comes back to me that there's nothing we can do about my pay right now, do you think I should try and pursue it further?

Of course! Why wouldn’t you?

i Think asking for a pay rise is fine.

I think basing it on other people earning less, when the company knows this will happen due to overlapping bands, isn’t the best idea.

They get paid the top for their role. You get paid bottom end for your role. Concentrate on yourself and why you don’t think you should be paid at the bottom of your own pay band.

Why wouldn't you

This is how the gender pay gap continues.

Some Women sit there questioning whether to ask, most men (and women who have their heads screwed on properly) wouldn't give this a second thought

I agree with this. How are you adding value to the business? Focus on how brilliant you are at your job and sell yourself a bit.

My company has recently gone through a massive change with pay bands due to the exact reason - and they realised many talented individuals were leaving to go elsewhere because they could get paid a lot more instead of sitting at the bottom of a fairly broad pay band and being denied any opportunity to get a payrise apart from when they got promoted to the next band up. Definitely ask for a payrise and consider what your role is paid elsewhere to help with leverage.