Workers are commanding benefits, bonuses and other paycheck-boosting goodies again.
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Benefits packages and overall compensation have become the No. 1 and 2 considerations for respondents of the Network World Salary Survey when rating job satisfaction factors “critical” and “very important” (see chart, below). For the first time in two years, this means “challenge of work” has not taken the top spot. Clearly, insurance, bonuses, stock options and other types of compensation are becoming highly important again. If pay raises must limp along at less than 6% on average, then workers are looking for help with their cost-of-living expenses (such as medical). They’re also eyeing that 8.2% average bonus increase to keep them happy.
When it comes to bonuses some titles were less rewarded, as were workers in some regions. Help desk trainers’ bonuses fell 20.5%, bringing the total they expect in 2004 to a mere $620. Software and Web programmers expect to see their bonuses decrease 5.3% to $2,330. Regionally, companies in the Southwest remained stingiest with bonuses, rolling them back 9.2% to $2,650.
But areas of the country that are rebounding economically – New England, the West, the Mid-Atlantic – are planning to dish out decent bonus increases overall. The largest companies will grant the biggest bonuses, and, not surprisingly, employees who work the most hours expect to reap the best bonuses, too.
How to get a great bonus
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Just because your company has a bonus program, don’t assume your staff knows how to make the most of it. These tips can help your employees get better bonuses.
• Make sure your employees truly understand how the bonus system operates. Some companies, particularly large companies, use standardized performance objective systems rather than the less rigid merit bonuses. Consider yourself lucky if your company uses a standardized bonus performance program, as more people tend to earn their bonuses under such systems.
Brian Hobbs, director of MIS services and support, explains how this type of bonus system works at window-covering vendor Hunter Douglas in Denver. “We set objectives at the beginning of the year, review midyear and pay out at end of the year. You have to have the skills to meet objectives, and we put some stretch objectives out there. Managers can’t randomly change percentages or additional bonuses without good justification for it,” he says. “I think it’s fair for people. They know what they have to do to get their bonuses.”
• With merit bonuses, underscore that managers are looking to reward initiative. “We do annual bonuses in our company and also merit bonuses. Merit is at my discretion and is something I reward the employee with if a project has been done over and above the outcome originally expected. It’s for when the employee has gone the extra mile to prove that he’s owned the project from the get-go – as opposed to doing something I just asked him to do,” says Lauren Anders, IT director at Sunwest PEO of Florida in Tampa.
• Help employees to think in terms of a project’s bottom-line impact and to throw their grandest bonus-earning efforts into projects that can save, or make, the most money. If they are unsure, let them know that you will support their efforts to research a project’s cost implications – this is one of the ways to show initiative.
Merit bonuses tend to go to those people who consistently take the initiative on big, successful projects. Employees who turn themselves into merit-bonus earners discover, as the saying goes, that excellence is a learned skill.
