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Mid-year 'cost of living' payment

Hi everyone, 

I was wondering what others thoughts were on paying a one off payment mid-year to help with the rise in the cost of living.

Also if and what other companies were doing to help with the rise of cost of living.

Thanks

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  • 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.
  • Steve Bridger

    | 0 Posts

    Community Manager

    12 May, 2022 05:56

    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.
  • Our Managing Director implemented a 3% pay rise for all employees in April which will now be a permanent fixture and may go up again later in the year depending on the economics. Worth noting we're an SME and our MD has encouraged anyone who is still struggling financially following this to let either him or me know to see if there is any further help we can look into

  • 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.
  • Saw this BBC article today which is fairly comprehensive - you can obviously dig in to the ONS stats that they quote from directly, if you like that sort of thing ;) www.bbc.co.uk/.../uk-61475720
  • Steve Bridger

    | 0 Posts

    Community Manager

    17 May, 2022 19:31

    In reply to Emily:

    Also worth checking out our latest Labour Market Outlook - published yesterday (16th May)...

    www.cipd.co.uk/.../labour-market-outlook
  • But I probably wouldn’t use wage inflation as at May to inform a Sept salary review.

    We applied a 5.5% increase for April salaries, based on the CPIH rate on 26th March. By the time we paid salaries on 26th April, CPIH was had increased to 6.2%…
  • There are some interesting ideas here.

    For our annual review in April we gave a 5% increase and are looking at possibly doing a 2nd review later this year, but I like the idea of one off payments or monthly energy payments they are ideas I will be suggesting.
  • Really useful question and responses, we've been pondering this matter so its been really helpful to see the replies, thanks everyone