Same. Although the company I worked for before switching careers actually paid out nothing the spring after I left. Not only did they not met the sales growth targets, when I left (essentially 9/1) sales were down >15% year over year.
Felt bad for a few people, but F that place.
0% in 2008. This year’s won’t be great, but should be more than nothing. Maybe 25% of target?
Never 0%, it has ranged from 60% of my Salary to 8% of my salary
I left one job after the pool was set, but before the actual payout ( I negotiated this with the new job), but felt bad that had I been able to give notice before the pool was set, my coworkers could have gotten a bit more
For a while, the running joke was that when I showed up at a place, it quit paying its target bonus. I literally went 7 years where my employer didn’t hit target after supposedly always hitting target. Now, it’s when I leave a company it quits paying its target bonus; the last 2 places, they’ve failed to hit target after I left.
When companies missed target, there was “missed target, but still cleared minimum” and “didn’t hit minimum.” In the latter, the company still paid out something 2 of 3 times to show employees yeah, we recognize you put in hard work, you shouldn’t get nothing for that. (The 3rd time, the company paid a bonus to one segment of the company because it purportedly hit target and everyone else got nothing. That went over well.) Employees will stick around when they get something; when they get nothing, they’ll bail out.
Yes. It was mostly the lean years of 2008-2011. However, two years ago my division was paid out only 60% of bonus. The primary reason given was that our employee survey results were unfavorable 
There was a significant uptick in the employee survey results last year. Management’s response was, “You like us! You really like us!” I’m positive the results were totally unbiased.
The employees gave negative feedback to management, so management cut their bonus?? That’s crazy.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
When I left my last true actuarial job (group pricing) they paid out a substantial bonus every May. I struggled in March to decide if I should stay and get the bonus, or quit in March. I quit in March. Worth it.
Yes. Well, technically we didn’t have formal targets, but there was a widely understood “on average people at this company get x% - y% bonuses” and they were paying our department very close to 0, with high performers getting more but still well below anything that would be typical.
After the first time I was pulled into an hours-long meeting about unfavorable survey results (about 20 years ago), I never wavered from the 5-spot (out of 5) again.
Nice humblebrag about being a key person
Yes, that is crazy. But management had to justify the bonus cut for some reason. We had just announced record profits but membership was down so they were tightening the belts. By looking at the insider trading activity, senior management certainly didn’t have any of their options cut.
That was also the year where one of my leaders asked us to fill out an “anonymous” survey on survey monkey or some other similar site to figure out why we scored so poorly on certain questions. I provided specific examples of why people would respond negatively and a few days later my boss comes up to me and says, “Do you even want to work here?” If you don’t want honest feedback to improve things, don’t bother asking.
Wow, that sounds horrible.
Amen.
This is why I won’t touch certain survey questions with a 10 meter titanium rod.
Hmm, let me rephrase that: I was brought into a meeting after my fellow plebes and I honestly answered survey questions.
After that I always ANSWERED survey questions 5 (out of 5) regarding management at large and my manager in particular.
I hope that clears up your grandiose image of me.
If I tell you what’s wrong and you come to me with a statement like that, I’m immediately looking for another spot and giving you the bare minimum required notice and basically closing up projects and doing nothing else.
This does bring to mind past observations about employee surveys:
Given enough time at a place, you can get a feel for how things are and know how much faith to put into employee survey results. That will let you know what kind of messaging to expect when a survey is announced and results are compiled.
If results are great, management will brag about them endlessly and probably in great detail. If they’re not, they’ll get excused for various reasons and you’ll still hear how great things are. If they’re really bad, they’ll be ignored (unless the CEO says to managers this is completely unacceptable, improve this or some of you will be looking for new jobs shortly as happened at one place) or described something like results were as we expected with no additional information ever being released. If you’re lucky, you might get yeah, we know results aren’t good, we’re going to try and improve on things - just realize the we’re going to try and improve on things line, which really means we’re not going to do anything and hope things magically get better.
Corollary to the above: management will advertise any positive results as being truly representative of the state of affairs, while dismissing negative results as not representative in some way. (If it reports on the negatives. If it does, it will probably be the “this negative is not really that negative at all, in fact it might even be a positive” game.) It might even ask to have positive responses segregated from negative responses to pitch a desired narrative and ignore any negative feedback, no matter how obvious it might really be.
If things are bad, management will admit to it no more than once. After that, see points 2 and 3 above.
When you’re asked for ideas on how to improve things, it’s nothing more than a pat-on-the-head thing to make you feel like you have a voice. Management doesn’t really care about your ideas for improving things.
As noted above, your “anonymous” responses are not really that anonymous - especially when it comes to your immediate supervisors, no matter how high the survey taker claims responses are aggregated. Well, your department’s responses are too small to preserve anonymity so we’re aggregating them with Finance. Yeah, that’s nice - your boss is still going to see how direct reports feel and will seek to find whoever had less-than-stellar grades and “deal with them appropriately.”
Corollary to #6: If you’re ever given an open-ended area to express thoughts, DO NOT EXPRESS NON-POSITIVE THOUGHTS. Better yet, leave it completely blank. Otherwise, you’re giving away any pretext of anonymity - which is bad, unless you’re already looking for another job.
My boss’s concern was that I had a bad attitude and maybe a foot out the door. The reality was that other than being mostly minor annoyances, the examples I provided were the kinds of things that just are. For example, one of the questions was about the quality of our facilities. The building I’m in has a mouse problem. It’s always had a mouse problem. It will probably always have a mouse problem. I can’t honestly grade the question high when we have mice! Not that I’d complain about it or quit over it but when you ask me for feedback I’ll tell you. I probably doxed myself with the examples I provided.
I always give my honest opinion on the employee survey. I’m at a point in my life where I just can’t care enough to lie. If get fired for being me, I’m okay with that. I do like how uncomfortable management gets when they present bad results. I’ve been tempted to respond with all 1s just to see what the reaction is.
I always answer those things honestly, including the free response section. If you don’t want to know what I really think… don’t ask me. 