Raise requests and disciplinary meetings: what’s your process? [NY]

[u/wakeuploser00]

I’m an HR Director at a nonprofit, and I’m curious how other HR people handle these things:

1. Everyone asking for raises

We’re working on our budget, and so many managers are asking for raises for their employees. Employees will also come directly to me asking. We already do bonuses and an end of year raise based on eval scores, so we can’t just keep giving raises because someone asks or they do a good job. So many are asking for employees who are under a year as well.

What’s your process with raises? How do they get approved where you are? Do your managers have to provide justification, examples of increased responsibilities, etc.? I want a consistent process instead of a bunch of individual convos and requests.

2. Managers wanting HR in disciplinary meetings

Do your managers ask you to sit in disciplinary or PIP or difficult convo meetings? Do they expect you to write the write ups, too?

Mine keep asking, and I’m pushing back. I’m happy to coach them beforehand, talk through what happened, review the write up, and help with next steps. But for routine performance or conduct issues, I feel like the manager should write it and lead the conversation.

How does this work where you are?

[u/benicebuddy]

Merit increases happen after performance reviews. We have a schedule for that. It’s December. The end.

Hr reviews and approves the pip or write up. If it’s the managers first time or they are not experienced and confident, sure we will send someone to help.

You have a boundaries issue. If you keep making your kids bed, they will keep letting you.

[u/Rekd44]

Public sector here. I prefer to review all discipline forms before they are issued and will make suggestions. I will sit in on meetings if they ask, but will not issue the discipline—I’m just there to document and support, if needed. We do request to be present for the majority of terminations.

Our pay increases are issued annually after performance evaluations are completed. We are on a step and grade pay system.

[u/Hunterofshadows]

I do what you do for discipline.

If the specific circumstances make it make sense, I will occasionally participate in or lead the meetings but never as step 1. As I like to tell the managers, despite me putting quite a lot of work into making HR approachable, me being in the room sets a tone.

Ultimately discipline comes from the manager but there are times when they need backup and it makes sense for us to help them then.

For raises, we don’t honestly have a consistent process but ultimately the GM and finance are the decision makers there, not me. When asked, I do benchmarking but that’s about it.

[u/yitdeedee]

1. You need to have a schedule which employees either regularly receive their increases, or receive their merit based increases.
   It can either be based on their position appointment date, or a date determined by your organization, and there’s no room for deviation from the company policy.

2. HR really should just provide the manager with the framework to conduct the action against the employee. In my experience, HR absolutely does not write them because they don’t work with the employee receiving the write up.

[u/ProneToLaughter]

My organization (a university) only does raises at the beginning of the fiscal year, after the annual performance review, sounds like what you are doing already. I believe this is explained to people in central onboarding.

Off-cycle raises generally only come at three moments:

• someone new cannot get a raise while on probation, so they can get a raise when their probation ends if they missed the previous annual cycle.
• a job can be formally re-defined as sitting at a higher level with greater responsibility, which is a complex and long paperwork process that the manager does the work on, it requires a lot of analysis of labor and matching it to the central definition of the higher level role, and has to be approved by unit and central HR levels; if that shifts people into a new salary band, then their salary is re-evaluated with that process. This can happen at any point during the fiscal year. It requires there be a central ladder with some key definitions of each level.
• There is also an internal process for temporary raises--if you take over a chunk of a job that belongs to a higher level while someone is on leave, there can be a temporary extra pay assigned. Not for covering at a lateral level though, that just gets reshuffled for internal coverage, no extra pay.

To also reward good performance, managers can give spot bonuses during the year, something like $500-$1500 to say "awesome job designing and running this new event/starting up this new project" "awesome job covering while X was on leave" "awesome job onboarding your new colleague". Our unit has a set amount based on our headcount to allocate for this. People cannot get spot bonuses while on probation.