Also had larger-than-expected bonuses when the company did particularly well. Or in one case less poorly than expected.
In the latter case they’d announced that if a particular metric was lower than X our bonuses would be $0.
The metric was lower than X but some of the other metrics were so much better than expected that they decided to give us all small bonuses anyway. Not really off-cycle raises, but deviating from the stated compensation plan.
And I assume you’re not counting exam raises as “off-cycle”.
I’ve had two off-cycle, non-promotion / non-job-change salary adjustments in my career.
One was an adjustment to bring actuarial salaries more in line with the market, after HR did some research in the topic in the wake of a consistent theme in some exit interviews.
The other was a 10% bump when I was working at a tiny, essentially family-run insurer, for having proven my value a few months after I started.
To be more specific, my employer’s raises company wide is a big fat 0%, due to economic headwinds blah blah blah…, with vague promises of possible increases later in the year…
They must have balls of tungsten. 0% when inflation is at 10% in the UK would likely see a third of the finance department bolt (actuarial folks still seem to be in really high demand right now as well in the UK).
Last year I got 20% total comp raise (9% salary and 11% bonus increase vs 2021) with inflation at about 13%, so this year being at 6% (6% salary and no change bonus vs 2022) with inflation at 10% kind of evens out. I’ll still push for an off-cycle adjustment of some kind because company is still pretty profitable (with a lot of work coming my way).
0% though in 2023. Yikes.
Did you get a huge raise last year and an emormous bonus in 2022? (That was a vintage year for bonuses in the UK).
I got a roughly 5% raise last year, and the American senior management made a huge song and dance about how this was the largest ever merit increment pot made available.
What they conveniently failed to mention was that the previous year, again it was 0 increments, blamed on COVID.
I suspect the “potential increase later in the year” is a carrot dangled (in front of the proverbial donkey) to attempt to head off an exodus as they have learnt their lesson from the previous 0 increment year. Rumour had it that lots of people left that year. One of the things with full-time remote working I suppose, people leave without anyone else really knowing.
mathy nitpick - if your total comp = salary + bonus, wouldn’t your increase percentage be somewhere between 9% and 11%, depending on breakdown of TC into those categories?
I jumped companies in late 2019, so in 2020 the raise/bonus was pro-rated. I did get large-ish boost from moving companies but that is not included in this poll.
Ditto. One was after my boss quit, and my new boss recognized that the old guy screwed me over, and adjusted my pay to where it should have been. The other time was a market adjustment to all actuarial salaries.
My employer is currently doing the reverse, reducing actuarial salaries. But they aren’t actively reducing pay, they are giving out raises less than inflation and “downgrading” a lot of jobs. So jobs that used to be done by “senior actuary” are now filled by “actuary”.
I’m staying anyway, because i have this sweet part time WFH gig, and the pay is enough to support my lifestyle, even if i could get more somewhere else.
