Hello HRians, There is one query I wanna highlight in this forum. Hope in this appraisal season everyone might have gone through this. If in case 3-4 of your most consistently performing employees are asking for 60-80% of hike, what you should do? If you have only one choice left to offer them the same or they will resign. There will be another problem, If you offer them, other employees also come up and ask the same since all discuss their salaries internally. How to successfully overcome this issue at a organization level? If anyone have concrete solution, please suggest.

Few workarounds here might be to provide an alternative to fixed salary- more ESOPs, retention bonus, better projects and if you want to justify the salary hike you can consider them for promotions

@Nirav Shah This is a tricky one. The only way (not necessarily a friction free one) I have seen this working is being transparent. We correlated performance with hike percentages. Also if somebody was at a significantly lower salary compared to others, that gave us more leeway in terms of hike percentage. People will talk and compare. The answer we gave was it's related to your performance. And here's the correlation. Did that pacify people? Not really. But they couldn't come back and say that they were being treated unfairly.

Agree with Sharthok here, correlating the hike percentage to the performance (making it quantifiable by setting up KPI/KRAs and breaking those down into small goals) can help here. What I have personally seen is giving crazy hikes to employees to retain them is a temporary solution, you'll be buying their loyalty for a few months. They'll still leave cause money is never enough, is it!? :) Instead try to create a clear career path for them, when they'll see clear growth and what they need to do to achieve that you'll see high engagement from them.

On similar lines of what everyone else has shared above, below is what I have experienced - • Is their ask unfair? i.e. is that pay beyond the market standards? If so, you can make them sit for a chat and counsel how given the current market scenario them jumping to unreal numbers can come back biting them. You can share your insights as a recruiter and the one who is connected closely to the hiring industry and wants to show them a helpful picture. • Is their ask fair? - If so, are you not considering this hike for them because of the economic factors? Asking so because you already mentioned they have been consistent performers. The market is competitive and good employees if not paid well, will move on. Money takes a priority at some stage. • If the ask is fair but as a business you are not prepared to offer what they are asking because of the high numbers, you can follow the approach Ashwathy shared. Also, giving some reassurance about how doing some of it now and some of it in the next cycle along with a few other benefits to compensate for it, might help.

Thanks a lot for contributing @Anshul @Shivani Pande