Work for a small employee-owned company who takes reasonably good care of me in general. I like the people I work with and like what I do. Pay is overall above average I think. We had a company meeting and questions were submitted to management to answer. Here are the responses on raises not keeping up with inflation, possibility for changes to WFH policy, and what they want to do to retain young talent.
On raises not keeping up with inflation due to sales this year being lower (still very profitable for the year and for the four owners). Bad answer…
“We’re not intending to make you whole on everything the government does wrong. We try to price salaries competitive in the marketplace and as inflation shows itself in salaries we will try to keep up. We aren’t going to give raises to keep up with the bigger inflation. The biggest thing you can do about inflation is to vote in November. Hopefully we will return to more normal inflationary numbers in the future.”
WFH is a sore point, as the only concession after WFH for a year + straight is 13 WFH fridays in June – August (when I am taking a lot of vacation anyway). Owner who is most adamant has been at home in NH 95% of the time compared to much less before COVID. Answer to question about changing policies:
“This is a fair enough question. Question we’ve heard a number of times, so it’s sort of repetitive. Going to give same answer as I’ve given in past. Company has considered this especially in light of what we were able to do during the pandemic. The company management feels it’s detrimental to the company to have employees work from home in general. There’s a cost to pay. I know some of you don’t agree with that. It’s the collective decision of the management. We do feel there’s a great benefit to the company for collaboration and working together as a team and training members of the team. The answer is no, we don’t have any plan to change the policy we currently have about working from home.”
Answer to question about what company will be doing to retain young talent.
“We're not just concerned about young talent, we're concerned about all talent. We plan to retain all of our talent through good wages, good compensation packages, which includes the benefits, salaries, and bonuses, and with good working conditions, good training and advancement opportunities, learning skills that are going to be valuable for employees, good continuing education and further education, in terms of degrees and universities. We support that. We feel, I feel, that we have a pretty attractive package for employees whoa re interested in this kind of work. Not the kind of work that is suitable for everybody. This is the kind of company where you work hard everyday in the office and you presumably get rewarded well in your total compensation and for some employees maybe that's not a good fit. We recognize that there are a lot of different people that have different priorities in life about life/work balance, different models for how life should be in general. We respect that, and just try to get a good fit when we interview people to make sure they fit in with the culture of the company and how we do our business.”
Also, the owner adjusted a question asking why some people get to WFH all the time (people who don't live local to our office) to be a question about enforcing the working in office policies against people who DO live local who are apparently taking liberties and working from home when not allowed. I've personally gotten approval for this kind of flexibility on occasion (to facilitate travel and accommodate doctors appointments, for example). Trying to really hammer home on the issue of being in the office.
I understand that walking to show them we have leverage is the likely answer but aside from that, don't know what else I can do. My three person team is all very strong in believing we can work from home effectively at least two days a week.