google: Google gave some ‘bad news’ to employees on increments

Employees — of any company — are always looking for more than a decent pay rise every year. More so, when inflation is on the rise. However, it looks like Google believes that the rising inflation isn’t a good enough reason to give employees an extra hike. According to a report by CNBC, Google employees raised the question about inflation and salary increments at an all-hands meeting.
At the virtual meeting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai read a question that was on a lot of people’s minds. “With the US inflation rates being as high as 7%, some companies are doing blanket salary adjustment to cover just the inflation,” Pichai said. “Is there any plans for Google to do the same thing?”
Interestingly, Pichai didn’t answer the question but directed it towards Frank Wagner, vice president of compensation at Google. Wagner, as per the report said, that he understands the concerns of employees and why inflation “does seem to be atop of mind for a lot of folks, and I think one of the reasons is that people are pretty eager to get their compensation that works,” Wagner said.
He further said that the company doesn’t have any plans to do “any type of across-the-board type adjustment.” Rather than giving smaller increments to everybody, Google wants to adjust it “pay it by performance,” argued Wagner.
“When we see price inflation increasing, we also see increases in the cost of labour or market pay rate,” Wagner said. “Those have been higher than in the recent past and our compensation budgets have reflected that,” he said.
The company leadership, as per the report, will release letters to managers this week and employees will know how much compensation is being awarded for next year.