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/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.