For a few years now the pay awards for Professional grade employees have been decided by the individual determination of their manager, rather than the pay matrix as previous, which is still used for Associate and Senior Associate Grade awards. This year however, given the cost of living crisis and soaring inflation, we agreed with the company that to ensure an element of certainty in what Professional staff would receive, that their pay awards would be decided using the pay matrix.

We are now engaged in discussion with the company as to whether annual Professional pay awards going forward should remain within the matrix or revert back to manager discretion.

It is argued that manager discretion is more nuanced and allows managers the ability to fix discrepancies. Counter arguments are that there is a lack of transparency, that to give one employee a higher award, it is at the expense of their colleagues due to the fixed pay pot, that there is no demonstrable benefit to the business in improvement retention or staff satisfaction and that managers time could be better used elsewhere.

As we represent Professional grades for consultation in AXA Commercial, AXA Retail and AXA UK Centralised Functions (IT, HR, Finance etc), we want to hear from you and what your thoughts are as to the approach you would prefer to see going forward by competing this short survey (click here)