Salary much lower than other, less strategic roles in the team.

[NineToFiveish]

Curious if anyone else has experienced a similar situation, and how you dealt with it?

I'm in a bit of a niche role on my org, with only 1 other role with the same job title in a separate team. We've recently discovered we are both in a much lower salary band than our respective colleagues with less strategic responsibility. We would like to raise it as an issue that needs rectifying, and have some benchmarking evidence from active job openings in the market showing a higher salary in line with our own job expectations.

Does anyone have any advice or success stories about this? It isn't small money either, our colleagues are getting paid circa 30k more than us. 😬

May I ask - are the higher paid colleagues male or female?

I would stay clear of bringing in what other people in the team earn. Normally a 3 prong attack:

Benchmark data on similar roles - from market, from agencies or see if your company are transparent with pay ranges or Comp ratio medians. Make sure it’s from respected resources (as best you can).

Your level of experience, are you learning in role, fully competent or long tenured? Someone fully competent in a role would be expected to be at median/middle of range, learning in role would be lower in range/might be below range etc.

Your performance - details of performance ratings and anything that supports high/strong performance. Anything that shows you are critical talent they would benefit from retaining.

It's a mixture, actually. The 2 of us are female, however. My colleague is longer tenured than I am.

Very helpful, thank you!