Mid-year 'cost of living' payment

If you can afford it and it fit with your strategy go for it - not sure many people will be putting in a second rise this year but dont let that stop you

We’ve just made the decision to pay a one-off cost of living payment to all our employees and it’s been very well received. Something that has come up for us and might for you as well, is that we’ve had quite a few staff received Universal Credit or working tax credits who have had to opt out of receiving the payment as it would actually put them at a financial detriment. So first you may want to consider making that an option, and secondly we are now exploring alternatives that we could offer, e.g. a voucher of commensurate value.

We’re also looking into running some repeats of financial well-being sessions that we’ve run before, The Money Charity is really good.

We usually do inflationary pay reviews in June, linked to the May CPIH %. This year, to acknowledge the pressure everyone is under financially, we brought the review forward to April (using the March CPIH of 5.5, which was almost immediately beaten by April’s…!).

We will potentially review again in September, and make a further inflationary review at that point if (when) CPIH has further increased.

We haven’t offered any one-off payments.

Very pleased to read this thread. Good for you, everyone.

Hi Sophie, really good question posed here so thanks for this. As Steve has remarked, it's heartening to read of other organisations helping their employees in light of what is being referred to as the 'cost of living crisis'.

We're only a small charity of 25, however it came as a lovely surprise a couple of months ago when our CEO authorised one-off payments to all staff, based on a sliding scale (more for those at the lower end of the salary scale, less for those at the higher end).

A good boost to morale!

We normally do a cost of living increase at the end of our financial year in November (we awarded 2%) - we are considering another increase of potentially up to 10% at the lower ends of the payscale. We are a medium company (50-100 staff).

As others have said, it is so encouraging to read this post.

I work for a publicly funded organisation so we cannot do cost of living payments. We are focusing on career paths and upskilling staff for promotion, getting in as many training opportunities as we can, really promoting internal vacancies and the benefits packages we are able to offer. It won't help in the immediate future unfortunately, but we hope that it will longer term for our staff.

Hi Sophie

At our organisation the directors have generously given an 'energy payment' which has been added to people's monthly salary. These monthly payments will continue till October! Which has been well received at the company.

Really useful thread, thanks all. Does anyone know where I can get an 'accurate' number for wage inflation UK for 2022? Our salary review is in September. We are a small renewable energy consultancy- don't want to pay for industry benchmarking at this point.