As a salaried employee, how do I tell my boss I won't do extra work without being paid more?

Question

I have worked for a few companies now, and I have noticed a trend, where oftentimes my boss (or above) will want to assign me more work compared to other co-workers on our team or department.

This usually occurs because of turnover or growth. Because these events are pretty cyclical, more often than not, the additional workload ends up being effectively permanent. My bosses like to say that this is because I am the most capable, or they are confident in my abilities, as to the reason why I get selected. The problem is that oftentimes, I am asked to do 50-100% more work compared to normal.

I have tried to leverage this for a promotion, but I've gotten shot down. Their reasoning is usually to the effect of: "You're not doing higher level work", "That's not what our needs are at this time", or "We don't have the budget for that". Sometimes, they will string me along for awhile too before using one of these excuses.

In short, I am somewhat bitter about constantly being used as a workhorse, and I want to put an end to it. (Honestly, the only way I've been able to move up in my career is by finding a new job externally.) In short, how can I tell my boss that I will not do any more work without being paid extra (even for a short period) and not be fired or punished for it? I'm just tired of being taken advantage of. If I'm not getting anything out of it (at least historically), I'd rather just do the bare minimum needed of my paycheck.

Answer 1

They keep asking you to do more work because you keep getting it done.

YOU COMPLETING THE WORK is a signal that you have capacity to do it, and thus they might be able to get away with slightly more.

Effectively, you need to FAIL to get them to stop. Establish a boundary where if you are assigned work, it's unable to be completed after that threshold without other things being impacted.

Let them know when they give it to you that you will try.... and then just let it fail the deadline. Let it be late.

If they question you, just say you tried and it took longer than expected.

Once this happens, they will understand your capacity and stop increasing it.

A managers job is quite literally to manipulate you, a human, much like a software developer manipulates lines of code.

They will almost always try to keep piling things on to over-achievers, knowing that they'll keep taking it without confrontation.

If you think about it, if you were in their shoes.... Wouldn't you want to see if you could pressure an employee into 10-20% more work for free? You're limited on headcount / budget, so you know you can't get another person... maybe have Steve do it. Tell him he's real important to the company.... Words are free. Managers have no budget on nice-eties and things they may say to you when trying to praise you up into doing this.

More nefarious managers may even dangle a pay raise or promotion 3-6 months out into the future, which is also FREE - when the time comes for it, magically there will be an HR issue, hiring / raise freeze, etc. The words you hear from your manager in the context of convincing you to work more are almost 90% of the time BS.

Fail enough, and they will understand you are at your capacity and need additional help. As long as you are putting in a reasonable amount of effort, there's no chance this backfires on you. (Literally... I've seen companies struggle hard to fire someone in 3-6 months that was actively causing problems for everyone around them).

In the end, you'll be much happier.

That's not to say, don't do your work - but don't be afraid, don't be stressed out that everything they give you has to be done at the deadline they ask for it. 95% of the time, if something isn't able to be made by a deadline, you let them know, and they just report it up the chain. Most times the only thing they ask for when finding out it wont make it is just, oh, darn, well when can we expect this by then?

This is effectively why it seems that employees aged 40+ collectively can't or won't get many surprise requests done without saying oh we have to plan this etc months into the future... They are professionals who have learned properly how to manage expectations and keep a work life balance. The sooner you get a handle on this, it will have an exponentially positive affect on your work life.

Additionally - if you say you don't think you can do something in time, and then you work harder overtime for free to succeed, you've just discredited yourself. You're training them not to believe you in the future, because it worked out. Say you will try but may not have enough time to complete it with other things going on, then fail to get it done. This reinforces that you do actually know what you can and can't complete in a time period, and they will likely start to believe when you push back on things in the future.

Don't worry about the concept of being fired by the way... it's very expensive to hire (and train!) new employees. If you are doing an adequate job - and you would know very undoubtably well if you weren't - it would be a huge pain to fire someone just to try and hire someone else for 10-20% more effort, even 50%. There's potential legal liability / risk to firing without cause, and on top of that, the position would sit open for a month or two while they found someone else. It's very rare unless something you're doing makes it so terrible that they realize they'd be better off with the position empty for a while.

Answer 2

In short, how can I tell my boss that I will not do any more work without being paid extra (even for a short period) and not be fired or punished for it?

You probably can't. You know your company and your boss better than anyone here could. But most companies and most bosses don't react well to this sort of stance. You may not get fired, but performance reviews could suffer.

You could ask to be changed from salary to hourly status. That's unlikely to work either.

I'm just tired of being taken advantage of. If I'm not getting anything out of it (at least historically), I'd rather just do the bare minimum needed of my paycheck.

If you want to get paid for every hour of your work, you need to find an hourly job. Depending on your profession, you might find that at another company. Or you might want to become a contractor.

If you want to just work the "bare minimum", you need to find an employer who doesn't care if you work hard or not or find one who won't ever expect you to work extra hours.

Answer 3

how do I tell my boss I won't do extra work without being paid more?

As others have mentioned in comments, ultimatums don't usually work well in the workplace.

Pay raises and promotions usually follow the extra work that warrants them. Very few employers will be willing to throw money at you in the hope that you will, at some point in the future, be worth it.

If your long-term interest is to build a career in your current workplace, you will likely need to accept the additional workload and build your prominence upon that, which, if successful, will bring about better pay and more prominent positions.

If your interests are of a shorter-term variety, then job-hopping, as you have noticed, is also a fair approach to higher salaries and better-sounding titles, and it doesn't require overtime (if you don't count the efforts spent looking for a new job). As long as you can up-sell yourself to other employers, you should be OK.

Pick the path that suits you best.