Salary Review

My company has just done a salary review exercise. They have just reevaluated the staff position and their salary accordance to the “New” job description. This exercise is done for a certain group of employees in the company i.e below X amount salary. I am not in this range. Below is my thought on the matter and not in a way to stir a calm lake or dig up a can of worms.

I think the first question that will come to most of our head is huh! job description isn’t it fixed when we joined the company. I am thinking that this exercise is to makes right what is wrong. I think the idea was to have a set of criteria to evaluate the staff. For example if you were a programmer, there should be a pre-set of expectation of what task should a programmer does. For example from programming to unit testing it, if we did not perform up to the expectation, the salary review will reflect that. If the programmer perform exceptionally good, then its time for him to move up the rank and get promoted.

This should give the staff a sense of securities in terms of their career path. But this should be done properly and systematically and not when the staff performance was reviewed and decision has been made. Then we tell the staff oh! your salary review was not so good as you did not match this set of criteria. I think the set of criteria should be publicize and broadcast to all staff concern first. However as I said earlier this is to set right what is wrong hence this could be a painful start but all great ideas should have a starting point.

Based on some of the complaints I think the majority of the unhappiness was on what the employee think they are doing against what the company thinks they are. Some of the staff is performing an “A” role but was classify as doing another which was lower, that’s where the problem arises, as the staff is expecting a different category of “reward” against the company’s. I guess salary review is very subjective, I guess I do not expect anything when its my turn unless there is "Dead Word" category, hahaha.