How to ask your boss for changes: the odds favour you.
Learning how to ask your boss for changes begins with one survey from 2024. Only four point one per cent of employed people in the American workforce had ever asked. However, about seven in ten who asked got exactly what they wanted. Roughly eight per cent were told no.
The two numbers you need first.
Before you study how to ask your boss for changes, notice how rare asking is. In 2024, only four point one per cent of employed people in the American workforce had ever asked. So asking employer to change your job is something about ninety-six per cent never try. Unless you are among those five point nine million people, you sit in the silent majority.
How to ask your boss for changes when you expect a no.
Of those who asked, about seven in ten got exactly what they wanted. Also, rather more than two in ten got part of it, while roughly eight per cent heard no. So do employers approve flexible requests? In Britain, eighty-seven per cent of formal requests were accepted outright.
What the figures cannot tell you.
However, the numbers do not show how ambitious the requests were. For example, starting at eight instead of nine sits beside restructuring a whole role. They also miss requests never made, because some people already knew the answer. Still, the real lesson in how to ask your boss for changes is that the most common outcome of asking is getting.
Your first step in how to ask your boss for changes.
Decide which of the three outcomes you honestly assumed you would get, and write it down.
Write one sentence naming a change you have never asked for at your current job.
From the book.
The first. In a survey of the American workforce in 2024, four point one per cent of employed people said they had ever asked their employer to change something about their job. Ever. In a whole working life. Not once. Not asked and been refused. Asked at all.
I Want to Start a Business but I Can't Quit My Job, chapter 13: Staying is allowed, and it can be the win
Questions about how to ask your boss for changes.
Is learning how to ask your boss for changes worth it if I fear refusal?
The figures suggest so, since only about eight per cent of those who asked were told no. However, some people correctly knew the answer already.
How many workers have ever asked their employer for a change?
In a 2024 American survey, four point one per cent had ever asked. That is five point nine million people.
Why does this chapter argue for staying?
Because a book that only pointed one way would be selling, not helping you decide. So this chapter puts the other case as hard as it can.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 13, “Staying is allowed, and it can be the win”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 How to ask your boss for changes: the odds favour you.
- 02 William Morris useful work: the three hopes test.
- 03 Four day week trial results: promise and limits.
- 04 Flexible working request letter: number, date, review.
- 05 Job crafting: add the good, claim the training money.
- 06 Self employed median income: the hidden hourly gap.
- 07 Flexibility stigma at work: the real cost of staying.
- 08 Part time request denied: what Rasmus Dall did next.