Mid-year 'cost of living' payment

Interesting to hear what other businesses are doing. We provided a 3% increase to all employees in May and now we are moving our 1st October appraisals forward to 4th July to allow for increase to be closer to help out the cost of living.
However, we still have employees who are not happy.

It’s great to see so many of you considering how best to support your people through the cost-of-living crisis - one in four readers who responded to a recent poll in CIPD Update have also told us that they have either offered, or are considering offering, a one-off bonus to help with price rises.

Katie makes a really good point about the unintended consequences of offering a one-off bonus: for some low-waged employees in receipt of Universal Credit or Tax credits, a one-off bonus could interfere with their benefits payments. This could make it difficult to budget and potentially leave them temporarily out of pocket.

Those employees may be better off if they were given the option of spreading the payment over several months – more like a temporary pay rise.

Have any of you considered or done this? It’d be useful to hear about how you went about it or any reasons you decided against it. If you gave employees options, what information did you give them to help them make their decision?

It's great to see some of you thinking outside the box too, in terms of other ways to help your workforce if bonuses and pay-rises are simply not feasible. We're curating some info and options for employers in a new cost-of-living hub, which we'll publish very soon on the CIPD website. We've already got lots of ideas in our existing in-work poverty and financial wellbeing resources. Do you have any other suggestions to add?

Thanks for that, Charles. Really pleased CIPD is doing this.

This is a great idea! Looking forward to the new hub on cost-of-living.

Thanks, Adham.

Could you please link to that recent poll? I received an email about it, but the link wasn't working for me. I am very interested in seeing the results.

Could you please link to that recent poll? I received an email about it, but the link wasn't working for me. I am very interested in seeing the results.

Stephen - this was the result of the poll ran at the end of June in the CIPD Update. I've broken down the responses below in case the image isn't clear.

Q: In response to the increased cost of living, has your organisation given, or is it planning to give, staff a cash lump sum (a bonus, stipend, allowance, etc) to help offset price rises? (This is in addition to any wage increases you've already provided - or plan to provide - this year)

Nearly a quarter of respondents had either offered additional financial support (in some form - bonus, stipend, allowance, etc) to at least some staff or were currently reviewing to do so. (10% to all staff, 6% to some staff, 8% currently reviewing).

The remaining 76% of respondents had no plans to offer additional support in this way.