More Northeast Ohio Employers Projecting Salary Increases for 2012

Data from the 2012 ERC Pay Adjustment & Incentive Practices Survey indicates that the increases being projected by Northeast Ohio employers are representative of a larger national trend of compensation practices. Of the 114 participating organizations, 89% are projecting salary and wage increases for 2012, a record high level since 2009 when only 45% of survey participants projected increases. This improvement falls just short of improvements found in national data reported by SHRM in an article from 2011.

Citing data from the 2012 Aon Hewitt U.S. Salary Increase Survey, the article projects salary freezes at organizations from the national sample will be down to only 4% when it comes time to make decisions about pay adjustments in 2012.

Not only is the number of organizations dolling out these increases improving, but the level of these projected increases are undergoing somewhat of recovery of their own as well. While projections are up less than 1% overall, many breakouts are anticipated to pass the 3% mark for the first time in several years- a noteworthy occurrence in today’s still unstable economic climate.

Another interesting departure from the 2011 results suggests that manufacturing appears to be moving towards a stronger “pay for performance” model. For an industry that has traditionally found the implementation of pay for performance policies particularly challenging, the 2012 survey shows modest growth in the number of manufacturing organizations offering merit based increases, up between 2 and 6 percent from 2011 in all job categories except for union workers in production/maintenance/service positions. When asked whether or not their organization has an incentive or bonus plan, this same breakout jumped nearly 15% over last year’s numbers, with 85.4% of manufacturers indicating that they do in fact have these programs in place.

The 2012 ERC Pay Adjustment & Incentive Practices Survey, published in June of 2012, reports pay adjustments, projections, and incentive and bonus practices for 114 participating Northeast Ohio organizations. Data are broken out by organizational size, industry, and individual employee groups (union and non-union production, maintenance, and service employees; clerical and technical employees; supervisory, managerial, and professional employees; and executive level employees).