My employer lets all their employees know in late May or early June what their salary increases, bonuses, and stock awards are, which reflects the performance of the employee and the company.
Grunts like me don’t know the full picture but I have my sources and they have confirmed bits and pieces. The first confirmed bit is that, at least on my team, merit or salary increases will be very small this year. I have been told it might almost nothing for some people to perhaps 6% if they are lucky. Given that inflation was and continues to be a tangible hit to most people, a negligible salary increase might actually mean making less money when inflation is factored in. I am not expecting great things here since I was promoted earlier in the year, meaning my salary was already bumped up months ago.
Bonuses at my place of employment are calculated using a formula, which can be confusing at times. The formula factors in the performance of the company as a whole, the performance of your particular team (in my case, the performance of the game I work on), and employee performance. Weakness in one of these areas can be offset by strength in the others. I have been told the company performance, while decent, slipped compared to last year. Last year, however, was probably a huge outlier. The company did phenomenally well, and it would have been hard pressed to repeat it. I have been informed that on the other hand, team performance this year was nearly the same as last, which it is to say it was tremendous. Our game apparently did very well again financially. Lastly, for personal performance, I can only guess that since I was promoted in this fiscal year, it would be odd that my personal performance for the purposes of bonus calculation would be rated low. All said, bonuses this year should be the same as last year, which is great and all, but earlier in the year, there were rumours that there was a chance that bonuses were going to wildly exceed last year’s. I suppose I shouldn’t complain since I know there are others on less fortunate teams that will receive significantly smaller bonuses.
As for stock compensation, this is a total mystery to me. I have no clue if I did well enough this year to merit additional stock awards. I would love some but even then, our stock has taken a bit of a hit compared to last year.
All will be known in a few weeks to a month.