More of a general opinion. I’m a 35m warehouse manager but I’m a raging liberal antiworker. My boss is nice, but he’s worked for the company for 30 years and is a huge boomer. He and I are both analytical and we get along, but I always fight to treat my employees better. I have 20 staff of hourly-paid workers. We are not short staffed and my team has always been able to work 40/wk.
Boss and I fight a lot about quarterly bonuses for entry-level staff. I know bonuses are taxed heavily in the USA, so I try to over-give my staff and my boss hates it.
He says the point of a bonus is for the above-and-beyond work and stretch projects your staff did outside their normal work. I’d argue that my team doesn’t have time for stretch projects and it’s not their fault their workload doesn’t let them time to do extra work for bonus money. He thinks we should appreciate all the perks of the company more than beyond just a simple quarterly bonus. I am much more black and white on the matter: “I’m not going to give my staff a paltry $50 bonus knowing it’s taxed to $30, which doesn’t even pay for a tank of gas to take my employee to work; I’m not going to expect them to be grateful to me for that.”
This lead me to thinking “do the younger generations even care about bonuses? Or do we just want straight money guaranteed in our salary?” I can’t find a lot of resources online, but my mood is “knock it off with the subjective potential money bullshit and just give them a direct pay raise instead.” If this is a generational thing, I want to show my boss how we should revise this. Am I correct in my thinking?
I think I want to encourage my boss to do away with bonuses for my team in favor of a new benefit program, but it’s hard to explain when news like portraying millennials as ungrateful.