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Does your severance package reflect your work at the company? When leaving a job, you may not know how to negotiate your severance pay.
Gardner Employment Law can help you use your strengths and performance to obtain greater benefits. Read on to learn more.
How can positive facts allow for more severance pay?
To obtain more severance pay, emphasize your contributions to the company and how they led to profits and success. Positive facts related to your performance can be a good negotiating point for more severance pay.
If you are able to find numerical data to back up your claims, use the data to support your assertions. As an example, use the increase in overall revenue due to the clients you brought in.
Showing a corporation that you have made an impact on their prosperity, may persuade your employer to accept your request for more money. This is especially true if you have a high-level manager to back up your performance.
Other examples of positive facts include:
- Receiving high ratings on yearly evaluations
- Receiving a raise or promotion at work
- Noting your strong work ethic
Using positive facts gives you leverage, enabling the severance package negotiation process to weigh in your favor.
Why are severance packages hard to negotiate and why do companies offer them?
If you are on your way out, you have very little leverage, especially if there’s any animosity in the mix. Also, the company may pressure you to sign the severance agreement immediately, making you feel that things are set in stone.
The HR person may tell you that the severance package is non-negotiable. However, these are often empty statements and issued so the employer can close the file and focus on other matters.
Your previous employer has two objectives when it comes to dictating your severance pay:
(A) avoiding a lawsuit and
(B) preserving its image in the public’s perception.
Companies usually offer the lowest severance package to persuade you to sign the release. It is the release that is important to the employer because when you sign, you give up any legal claims that you might have against the company.
This means that the first offer presented to you is likely lower than the amount you truly deserve. In years past, severance pay generally was based on how long you worked at the company and your income. That has changed. Now, companies try to pay out as little as possible.
Social media and the public eye are always on the lookout for how companies treat employees. So even though severance pay is not required by law, giving employees a solid severance package allows the company to maintain a strong persona in the public eye.
You can take the time to negotiate your offer and leverage positive facts in your negotiation to earn yourself higher compensation. According to The Wall Street Journal, when negotiating for better severance do not “underestimate the three P’s in this equation: power, personality, and politics.”
Don’t minimize the role you had in the company when negotiating; use it as the driving force of your claims.
How does this negotiation work in practice?
In a case that we handled, we were able to utilize positive facts to the client’s benefit, despite corporate politics. Here’s that case:
Our client worked as a supervisor in a corporation. He had a great relationship with his supervisor, a Vice President. They had worked together for years, and the VP consistently gave our client positive annual reviews.
Abruptly, the company’s CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer) delivered a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) to our client. The PIP was based on allegations that our client had mistreated a younger employee, causing that younger employee to quit.
Our client knew from reading the PIP that the allegations were written by his VP supervisor. However, the facts as stated in the PIP were not true. The truth was that the younger employee was not performing well and our client was simply giving the employee performance feedback. Our client had even discussed the problem with the Vice President.
The CHRO next informed our client that he must leave the business. The CHRO likely issued this ultimatum because the relationship between our client and the VP was beyond repair.
So, our client came to us for help. We helped draft a list of demands that included a narrative describing our client’s immense value that he had brought to the company.
Ultimately, our client received an excellent severance package and secured a position in another city.
This scenario illustrates how using positive facts allowed our client to make the best out of a bad situation.
How can you be paid the severance that you deserve?
At Gardner Employment Law, we can help you use positive facts to increase your severance pay. If you find yourself in a forced exit even after superior performance, we can help. Give us a call.