Salary Reviews

  3 minute read  

It is the enthusiastic goal of the engineering department at intelliHR to provide proactive adjustments to salaries, a transparent review process and clear expectations for every defined position. The following process is employed at regular intervals, at least once a year.

Salary Review Process

Budgeting

At the end of a financial year, a new budget is produced with estimates that are inclusive of:

  • Market changes to salaries locally and globally
  • Expected team growth (new roles)
  • Promotions
  • Mid-year salary adjustments

This budget also includes the creation and adjustment of a set of salary bands for all common positions in the department.

At any time mid-year, at the discretion of the board, intelliHR may be required to produce a reforecast of the budget. A reforecast can affect any of the line items in the budget.

Review Process

At regular intervals throughout the year that are set out in the forecasted budget, the department managers and CTO conduct the following process:

  1. Gather market research from local and remote sources and review the salary bands against market rates
  2. Adjust the salary bands as required
  3. Analyse each staff member’s remuneration and adjust so that they are still accurately represented within their band (for example, if an employee is paid at a rate that is 60% of the difference between the min-max of a band, ensure that they are adjusted to remain 60% between the min-max of the newly adjusted band)
  4. In conjunction with line managers, review each staff member’s growth within their band since their last review (for example, is the employee demonstrating competencies at 50% of the expectations for their role, or have they grown their skills and are now demonstrating 80%)
    • It is this stage that can most accurately be described as a ‘performance review’
    • If an employee has not completed a competency assessment recently, they may be asked to complete one for this assessment
    • An employee’s self-development goals are often used as a direct indicator of competency growth, and so can directly affect this part of the review process
    • The time since last increase, and size of last increase and probation periods can affect the outcome of this review but there are not explicit rules
    • The employee or their manager may request 360 peer feedback during this stage (this can be found on the dashboard of the internal tenant)
  5. After adjustments are made, the department manager and CTO will assess the aggregated increase against the forecasted budget. Any conflicts between the proposed adjustments and the forecasted budget are negotiated at this stage
  6. Once all conflicts are resolved, the budget is submitted to the board via the COO for approval
  7. Once approved, salary adjustments are issued to staff for their approval. If a conflict arises here, the employee, their line manager and the department manager will meet to discuss and resolve any changes and set expectations going forward

The department manager will announce upcoming reviews before this process is started. The components of the review process in step #4 can be conducted at any time or frequency, at the discretion of each employee. Employees are encouraged to reach out to their line or department manager for these reviews, independent of the salary review process.

Salary Bands

As mentioned above, intelliHR maintains a set of salary bands for all of the common positions in the department. These bands will not be published here but they are not confidential. The latest bands, and even the data sources we use to define them, will be supplied to any department employees on request.