How do you guys handle it when a relatively good employee asks for an outrageous raise? I just had a guy who is being paid $18/hour ask me to be paid $28/hour. He’s a decent worker, but really not particularly skilled at anything. I have much more skilled employees that make less than what he’s asking for. This person does mostly odd jobs throughout the business. He said he came up with that number because represents a 10% raise for each year he has been here, though the math clearly doesn’t work on that; he would be at less than $24/hour even if I had given him a 10% raise each year.
I agree he deserves a raise, but that amount is crazy. I can hire much more skilled and competent people at that rate. I’m somewhat indifferent to whether he stays or goes, but I don’t see him really quitting as he and my office manager are a couple, and they like to commute to work together. I can handle things if both of them quit. Life would be less fun for a bit, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t see any real scenario where they will be otherwise able to work together like they do now.
So I would say a few things…
First Time in a position has very little to do with whether some one is deserving of a raise… That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve one, especially if he hasn’t gotten one in years…
You don’t really go into what he does, and because “odd job doer” isn’t exactly a career path its going to be hard for you to pull up employment statistics on sites like Glass Door or government databases… The closest comparable is Virtual assistant or Executive Assistant which is going to be a wide pay range depending on what “odd jobs” entails, so not very helpful…
Frankly based on the performance comments and the odd jobs comments this sounds like a position that you have created just to help your office manager out and if you wanted to lose it, you could… The real question is, if you lost this person, would your office manager quit too…
I would comment that you seem like you are making a lot of justifications about this employee that contradict each other… For instance, You say the employee isn’t very skilled/competent at their job, but you give them a significant$4k bonus every year… and have given them small raises in the past… If they were truly incompetent you wouldn’t be looking to offer them more of your money, you would be looking to get rid of them…
Even if they started at an outragous figure, and got there with bad math and bad reasoning, You need to figure out what the employee is worth to you and what it would realistically cost to replace them when they quit… That number might only be the $18/h that they are being paid all things considered… its up to you, its perfectly reasonable to say "I can hire an overqualified VA to replace 90% of your role for $10/h, and let other people pick up the slack on the other 10% so if you want to quit there’s the door… Its also ok to say "I like you and your wife and you’ve both been with the business since it started, so while I can’t give you a $10 raise, I can find $2 but you are going to have to start learning some extra skills and developing some more competencies…