In February 2022, CIPHR, who are a software provider, conducted an online survey of over 1,000 employees and separately 332 employers, to find out about pay rises and working practices.
The employee respondents work in organisations that employee between 26 and 251+ people but with two fifths working at companies with over 251 employees.
The respondents to the employers survey held job titles including Owner or Partner, CEO/President, CFO, Director, or C-Level Executive and over half of the companies in the survey employed 251+ workers.
The survey showed that although 63% of employers say they have, or are planning to award their staff a pay increase for 2022 that’s in line with, or above the rate of inflation, 45% of men and 53% of women say they’ve not yet received a pay rise for 2022. Of that 27% of employees who state they have received a pay rise for 2022 (as at March 2022), 8% of men but only 2% of women say that this was an above inflation wage rise.
Factors that the employers who were surveyed say they take into consideration when determining pay rises include an employee’s performance (45%), cost of living (37%), an employee’s potential (36%) and the market rates for their job roles (36%). However, only 17% of employers thought that their staff were completely aware of all the different factors that determine pay increases.
Of those that have received an uplift, over three-quarters (78%) feel that their pay rise hasn’t kept up with the rising cost of living in the UK. Also, 64% believe that it wasn’t fair and 70% that it wasn’t an indication of their performance.
Perhaps as a reflection of this, employees who think their last pay rise was unfair are more likely to change employer within the next year (44%) compared to 25% who are happy that their last pay rise was fair. Over a third of those surveyed said they would only need to be offered a 10% to 14% pay rise to move to a new company in a similar role to their current job.
One in five (21%) employees, on average, have been approached by a recruiter or head-hunter in the past three months. For people working in Consulting, Human Resouces, IT or Sales, for example, it’s much higher.
When it comes to job seeking, the majority of employers believe that ‘employees and job seekers are in the driving seat when it comes to negotiating salaries, benefits and flexible working’. However, only one in four women agree with this and 88% of male workers aged over-55 think that it’s their employer who is firmly ‘in the driving seat’ at work.
