How To Negotiate Salary When You Work Remotely

If you aren’t negotiating your salary, you’re leaving money on the table. According to a Forbes report, 70% of hiring managers expect potential hires (and current workers) to negotiate their salary. However, only 46% of men and 34% of women actually go through the process. These are striking figures that underscore the idea of a worker’s perceived worth, as well as their ability to strike a deal or exude confidence in the negotiation process. Moreover, those that attempt to negotiate a deal tend to overlook integral aspects of the negotiation process. It’s truly a war of attrition, and you’ll need to bring your five-star general skills to the table. If you want to learn how to negotiate salary as a remote worker, make sure to follow these tips.

Why Remote Workers Skip Out on Negotiation

With over half of workers skipping out on the salary negotiation process, one might wonder why people are accepting the first offer without testing the waters. The answer is deeply rooted in human psychology: many people subconsciously or overtly practice conflict avoidance. While no studies exist documenting the number of people who avoid conflict at all costs, the current number of non-negotiators in the workforce can probably shed some light on the situation as a whole.

How Conflict Avoidance Can Hurt Your Income

Conflict avoidance is typically the result of people-pleasing. This includes situations where you’re the recipient of people-pleasing, or you grow up in an environment that was either hypercritical or dismissive. Interestingly, older generations tend to negotiate salary with far more frequency while younger individuals are far more reluctant. But parenting habits have changed. While a hard-nosed, corporal approach to parenthood was the defining method of rearing children in the past, parents have become far more lax in rules governing behavior. In addition, a positive spin or praise in every aspect of a child’s life doesn’t do them favors in the future. It can breed entitlement and the inability to deal with certain adult situations, including how to negotiate your salary.

Why Conflict Avoidance Isn’t Always the Root of the Problem

Your childhood may have a psychological effect on how to negotiate your salary, but that doesn’t mean it has to cripple your approach. In fact, conflict avoidance is only a small piece of the puzzle. The real issues arise when you continually make mistakes in the negotiation process as a jobseeker. From undervaluing yourself to failing to research the market rate of your position, you can sink your negotiations before they start.

If you’ve ever felt that your negotiations were weak, capricious, or arbitrary, you’re in the majority. In actuality, few people ever master the art of negotiation. As a result, millions of workers each year miss out on extra income. But knowing the common mistakes that can hinder your approach is half the battle. Once you’ve pinpointed your prior errors and get a basic idea of where to start, you can become a salary negotiation guru.

Know Where to Start

Perhaps the most crucial mistake that workers make on how to negotiate is not knowing where to start. They don’t conduct any research on salaries, putting them in the sea of uncertainty with respect to pay. That’s why you should always research how much your job title gets paid. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior executive, a customer service representative, or mid-level management. Knowing the market rate is vital to the negotiation process. Fortunately, you have many resources to find average wages, including:

Payscale
Glassdoor
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Salary Explorer

Some of these are compiled statistics while others are salaries submitted by actual workers. By putting together an average of both, you can get a basic idea of what you’re worth, what the market is willing to pay, and how much you should negotiate for.

Pro Tip: Once you know how much people in your position get paid, the first step in how to negotiate your salary is to add 10% to 20% to the average wage. Or, if you find yourself to be a savvy talker or shrewd negotiator, you should know the wage you already want. Let’s say you want $60,000 a year, but the job only wants to pay $58,000. From here, you only need to make negotiations to reach the pay you wanted in the first place. And that’s how true professional negotiators run their business.

Don’t Be Pushy

Everyone wants to cash in on a big payday. You’re no different. But avoid the urge to bring up salary before it has a rightful place in the conversation. Interviews are more about getting to know a bit about your personality, and how you can respond to certain questions. It’s not about how much you’re going to earn right off the bat.

If an employer wants to hire you on the spot, they’ll throw a figure your way. At this point, you’ve hopefully learned how to avoid mistakes while knowing approximately what you’re worth, and that’s when you spring into action. Talking turkey before it’s been brought up in the conversation isn’t just untactful, it can also come off as pretentious and rude.

Know When to Walk Away

Much like buying a car, knowing how to negotiate your salary when you work remotely is all about walking away. Even if you need the job, do you want to be saddled with a pay rate below the average for your position? Probably not. In fact, many employers that have low-ball offers often aren’t worth working for anyway. They often have other problems within the organization that require them to cut costs in other ways, or they have a company culture that doesn’t reward hard work or other accomplishments.

Knowing your bottom-line value isn’t easy. But you can calculate it as such:

Having a top-rate knowledge of the salaries for your particular position
Being able to pay your bills and put a little bit away for savings
Not eating ramen noodles for every meal due to your salary
Not turning the heat/air conditioner off even though you need it

Furthermore, you should also gauge this position as a potential stepping stone. If the employer is only able to offer your rock-bottom salary, it should give you the experience you need to propel you to the next job that will pay you your worth.

Get Creative

Jobs aren’t just about salary. And if an employer isn’t willing to give you the salary you desire or only hits your walk-away rate, this is when you can really learn how to negotiation through other means. Instead of negotiating for more money, turn the discussion in another direction. So perhaps you can accept their offer, but only if they throw in other perks such as:

Gym membership
Added or unlimited paid time off
Bonuses of various types
Business expense reimbursement
A stipend for upgrades to your home office

By thinking about other ways to get the compensation you desire, you can turn the negotiations in your favor, leaving the employer to make the decision.

Learn How To Respond to a Salary Rejection

The art of how to negotiate your salary as a remote worker isn’t just a one-way street. You have to expect a bit of kickback from the employer. It’s almost like a dance where neither party wants to lead. Or an up-and-down-the-court basketball game. Or a chess match. All of these personify the salary negotiation process.

So don’t be surprised if you get a phone call or an email that let’s you know that your salary request has been rejected. The reasons that the employer lists — not in the budget right now, other qualified candidates accepting less, etc. — are all irrelevant. This is your opportunity to ask more questions or tout your skills. For example, you can ask them what extra qualifications or experience you would need to get your desired salary. Conversely, you can cite the skills or performance numbers you have to justify what you’re asking.

Either way, don’t take a salary rejection as a death sentence. It’s merely a hiccup in the midst of a healthy salary negotiation.

Practice As Much As You Can

You’ll find articles all over the internet about how you should practice speeches, instruments, or pretty much anything else. But how many people actually do it? Few, if any. That said, refusing to practice for salary negotiations as part of your general interview practice is doing yourself a great disservice.

The goal here isn’t to regurgitate what you’ve learned or to recite a script. It’s just going through a mock interview process enough that you feel confident when you’re actually on a video conference interview. While this may or may not eliminate the nervousness or anxiety you get as a result of an interview, it will at least help you appear confident in the eyes of the hiring manager. That’s a crucial step.

Don’t Let Periods of Unemployment Get in the Way

The COVID pandemic caused some of the biggest furloughs and mass layoffs since the Great Recession. But unlike the recession of 2008, the COVID pandemic is still fresh in people’s minds. As a result, they’re empathetic to your scenario. In another situation, perhaps they would low-ball you just to see how you react to the salary. But employers are less likely to give you a low offer if they know you’ve been out of work due to the pandemic.

Interestingly enough, even if you were laid off due to the pandemic, you shouldn’t succumb to the pressures of taking a job that’s below your walk-away rate. Calmly describe why you were unemployed and leave it at that. If they ask more questions, give honest answers.

The idea here is that you can’t reek of desperation when you go into the interview. Like sharks sense blood in the water, some hiring managers can do the same. Keep your confidence and self-esteem up, even if you’ve been out of work for a year or more. Great employers admire perseverance, and you’re a shining example of how to overcome adverse situations.

And if you need a quick refresher on interviewing in addition to salary negotiation, make sure to check out the Virtual Vocations Interview Guide below.

Inevitably, it’s up to the employer to agree or shun your required salary. But by learning how to negotiate as a remote worker, you’re never leaving money on the table. And that’s why you shouldn’t underestimate yourself. If you feel that your services are worth a certain price, say so. The only downside is regretting that you failed to do so in the first place.

Do you have any tips on how to negotiate salary as a remote worker? What’s worked for you in the past? Connect with Virtual Vocations on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube to share your thoughts and tips. We’d love to hear from you!