Why Your Salary Is Stuck and What Fixes It

Your workload has climbed every year for three years. Your pay has not, or it moved by an amount that inflation ate before you noticed. Ask for a raise and your boss says the numbers do not support it. The frustrating part is that you are both describing the same situation accurately.

Prof. Dr. Yong Chen Chen teaches economics at Universiti Malaya and spends a good part of her working life inside companies, redesigning roles and rebuilding wage structures. Companies bring her in with a goal, often something like wanting staff who feel appreciated enough to give their best, and she works backwards from there to what each role is actually worth. Her starting position is that most jobs, as currently written, cannot be paid more. What she does about that is the interesting part.

1. Piling on work is what keeps your pay flat

There is a difference between job redesign and job expansion, and almost every stalled salary sits on the wrong side of it. Expansion means your role keeps collecting tasks while the method stays the same. Redesign changes the method.

Yong is blunt about why expansion fails. Staff say their wage has not increased, or the increase was not enough, while the workload keeps rising. Those two facts are related in the opposite direction to what most people assume. The extra hours are not evidence that you deserve more, because the work you added produces the same value per hour as the work you were already doing.

Take a job that is mostly data entry. As the company grows, that pile grows with it. But the work does not become worth more. On the same budget, a company gets more out of five people than out of paying one person a premium, because past a certain volume a tired person starts making mistakes. Meanwhile that one person is asking for career progression and a higher salary, and there is nothing in the role to fund it.

So both sides end up with a grievance. The boss asks why you are not performing to what he wants, and you ask why he expects so much.

The way out is that data entry roles are, in Yong’s phrasing, no longer needed. Automate the Excel work and the person who managed it moves on to something the automation cannot do, which usually means running the process rather than feeding it. That is redesign, and it is the version that produces the money for a raise.

2. The knowledge bank is what actually makes you promotable

When Yong walks into a company that is bringing in AI, she does not tell staff to go for tool training and apply it to their job scope. She tells them to build a knowledge bank.

A knowledge bank is your job, written down. It starts with the SOP, the company process and your process. Then the mitigation plan, which is where the value sits. The supplier who went quiet halfway through a project and what you did about it. The hiccup nobody warned you was coming. It reads like a playbook, a spine of do A, B, C, D, with branches hanging off it for the yes and the no at each step, and you keep adding branches as you accumulate cases.

Two people benefit from that, in different ways. The boss gets continuity, because if you leave, your successor enters the knowledge bank and picks up where you stopped instead of starting from nothing. Your own benefit is the bigger one. Ask AI a question cold and you get the answer for a company in your industry, which is not your company and does not have your suppliers or your constraints. Feed it your documented cases and the answer is about your actual situation. As Yong puts it, this is not about getting work done faster or doing more jobs in the same time.

Sometimes you sit someone down to document their scope and they have nothing to write. Yong’s first answer is that it is the manager’s problem, and she means it: if there is genuinely nothing there, the tasks were never assigned properly. Her second answer is harder. Someone who tells her they have too many things to do, or that they do not know how to start, is telling her they are not clear on their own job scope. She does not fire that person. She looks for what they might be competent at that nobody has spotted, moves the scope, and watches. Sometimes a job redesign starts with discovering the role was wrong from the beginning.

The assumption usually runs the other way, though. It is tempting to think Malaysian SMEs simply do not document anything, and Yong says that is not true. Plenty of staff have their SOPs sitting in Google Drive already. They just keep quiet about it, because nobody ever asked them to share and there was no direction from the top. So the writing is not the gap. What is missing is that nobody else can see how things changed over time or what challenges you hit, which is exactly the information a manager needs to decide what to do next.

3. The redesign is where the money for your raise comes from

A small retail chain wanted to grow sales, so it opened a second shop. Opening was the easy part. Staffing it was not, and they could not recruit fast enough, so one of the existing shop managers had to transfer over and run it short-handed. Everyone knew the problem, and nobody had a budget for it.

The solution came from a staff member, not from management, and it cost the price of some phones. Buy handsets with a POS app, and the salesperson on the floor becomes the point of payment. When a customer is holding the product and clearly wants it, you close the sale right there.

Under the old flow, the customer who wants to buy walks to the counter, and on the way there they pass a dozen other products and start reconsidering. They put the goods back, or they decide to compare prices at another shop first. That walk was a gap where the decision could unwind. Close the payment in front of the customer and the gap disappears. Sales rise, and the cashier position stops being necessary.

That saved headcount is real money, and it is what a compensation redesign draws on.

Two caveats Yong is firm about. First, you have not become a cashier. Your core skill is still convincing a customer to buy, and the phone exists to support that, not to hand you a second job title. If someone frames this as sales plus cashier, the redesign has been misread.

Second, the money arrives after the result does. Base salary moves slowly and on its own cycle, so the reward for a redesign usually shows up as bonus or allowance first, once the sales numbers confirm the thing worked. And it does not have to be cash. In her interventions she has met plenty of staff who are not eyeing money at all. Some want the company trip. Others would rather skip the annual dinner entirely, because to them it is an evening spent out of the house on the company’s schedule. Working out what a person would actually consider a reward is part of the job.

4. The cheapest fix is usually the good one

A 40-storey building with four lifts had a complaints problem. Residents waited too long, they were unhappy with the vendor maintaining the lifts, and the obvious fixes were all expensive. Running lifts faster drives maintenance costs up sharply. Adding a fifth lift means reconstruction, which is not happening.

So they tried zoning, assigning each lift to a band of floors so it skips the rest. It did not solve the complaint, because routing was not what people were unhappy about.

What worked was a mirror. Put a mirror or a reflective panel in the lift and people check their hair, fix their lipstick, look at themselves for a moment, and then the doors open. The wait stops registering. Complaints dropped, the vendor came out of it looking competent, and no engineer had to computerise anything.

The mirror is systems thinking done on a shoestring. The rule Yong keeps returning to is that solving your problem must not create one somewhere else. Fix something in your department in a way that dumps work on another department and that department starts complaining, which is the outcome a boss dislikes most.

Hotels run into the same trap. If guests want a fast check-in, the instinct is to get them into the room within a minute of arrival. You cannot clean a room in a minute, so that solution collides with housekeeping and fails. The workable answer treats the same feeling from a different direction, with a welcome drink on arrival, or a voucher for the bar if the wait passes ten minutes.

Scale that up and you have the reason a lot of SMEs cannot pay better. Growth arrives, the reflex is to hire ten more admin staff, and the payroll absorbs the growth. Redesign the admin work first and one person with decent tooling covers most of it, which leaves the increment budget intact.

5. How to raise it so your boss actually hears it

You can do all of the above and still get nowhere, because most people pitch it wrong.

Yong has watched a lot of employees approach a boss with “I have a new idea, can I have an appointment with you.” That gets deferred, every time, because the boss is busy and an appointment about an unspecified idea is an easy thing to postpone. Change one thing about the sentence. Tell them you have run into this problem and you have the solution, and ask for one minute. Now you have their attention, and they will call you in.

The competitor framing works on the same principle. Tell your boss that a competitor is already doing something and ask whether the company should follow. That is a question a boss cannot comfortably defer, and it puts you in the room. Yong points out that when you do this you are usually telling them something that never crossed their mind, which is when a manager notices that you are watching things outside your job description.

There is a limit to this. Some staff overdo it until they become the person who arrives every week with another problem. If nine out of ten of those are not genuinely critical, and most of them are things that person simply dislikes, the boss starts reading it as evidence you have too much spare time. That reading gets much worse if your own core work has slipped in the meantime. Deliver your scope first, then add the initiative on top of it.

One more thing changes the odds. A lot of the time the boss struggles to instruct people into a change they did not choose, and the same idea moves further when it comes from a peer or a supervisor the team already trusts. If you can bring one or two colleagues along before you bring it upstairs, you are proposing something that already has a team behind it.

6. Two things have to be true before any of this works

None of it functions without trust between you and your superior. Where the confidence is there, Yong finds staff rarely refuse work that falls outside their job description, because they read it as an opportunity to show what they can do. Where it is missing, you get the calculative version: my JD says part A, part B is not my job. She calls that too calculative, and notes drily that the same person is usually less calculative when the pay review comes around. But the behaviour makes sense if you assume the extra effort will be pocketed and forgotten.

So check two things before you invest in any of this. Do you trust the company not to take advantage of you, and do you feel valued here? If both answers are no, the redesign is not your problem to solve, and a job search is the more useful project.

Your surroundings matter more than people expect too. Yong’s observation is that an experienced staff member sitting in a team of equally settled colleagues is very hard to move, because when disruption arrives the whole group has the same reason to resist it. Put the same person in a mixed team and one person shifting is enough to start the rest moving. If everyone around you has stopped growing, change in that team is going to be slow.

7. Your pay follows competency, not whichever AI you learned this month

Students today learn Claude one week and Gemini the next, chasing whatever someone told them is better, and Yong’s warning is that the gadget is not the skill. If Google raises the price on Gemini next year and you move to a different platform, can you rebuild your process there? Someone who designed the process and wrote the knowledge bank can say yes without much thought. That gets much harder if your value lives inside one product, and the whole organisation gets a hiccup when the contract changes.

The higher salary is buying the competency underneath the tool rather than the tool use itself, which is why the professionals whose sign-off carries legal weight are also the ones nobody is automating away. Yong is clear that certain work requires human authority and verification, accounting sign-off being the obvious example, and that fully automating it is not on the table.

It also explains the awkward moment fresh graduates are in. Senior staff who were previously stuck are having a very good year, because an experienced person with AI tools can cover work that used to need several juniors, and companies would rather pay one salary around RM12,000 than three at RM5,000 to RM8,000 each. Yong’s read is that part of this is an expectations problem: employers want a fresh graduate to perform straight away, and a fresh graduate cannot. The core knowledge is there and the support still has to be given.

Her advice to graduates is unglamorous. Do not be picky about the first job. Get exposed to the business world as fast as you can, because breadth of cases is what converts a degree into competency, while the degree on its own only shows that you can learn.

What to actually do with this

• Check whether your role has expanded or been redesigned in the last two years. If you are doing more of the same work, that is the reason the pay conversation keeps stalling.
• Write your knowledge bank whether or not anyone asks. Start with one project that went wrong and how you handled it.
• If you already have SOPs sitting in a personal folder, share them, because work your employer cannot see does not get paid for.
• Find the process in your company that produces the most rework or waiting, then check that fixing it does not create work for another department. Without that check you are only moving the problem along.
• Bring your boss a solution and a one minute ask, not an idea and a meeting request. Keep your own scope delivered while you do it.
• If neither trust nor appreciation is present, stop optimising and start looking. Redesign only pays off where somebody is willing to pay for it.

How the work is put together sets your salary, far more than how hard you push at it, and that structure is usually visible once you go looking for it. Changing it does not need permission from anyone senior. It starts with writing down what you already know.

We went through the whole thing with Prof. Yong on the channel, including the parts about how bosses prepare staff for change:

How Companies Secretly Decide Who Gets Paid MoreWatch on YouTube · Mr Money TV