several times already I’ve had supervisors who would be making decisions regarding my compensation, yet who didn’t know how it worked or what it was.
The one who didn’t know what my salary level was.
The one who didn’t understand why, in a company where everybody was supposed to work 1800h/yr, those of us in 12h shifts had more vacation days (but not more vacation time) than those in 8h shifts.
The ones who don’t understand that getting a daily amount for lunch has different taxation consequences than getting paid back the amount you paid for lunch. Or that if your company prepaid your hotel stay you will not have a bill, Accounting should already have it.
And even the one who thought it was illegal for him to know how much his subordinates got paid.
So, here’s my questions:
If you’re a boss:
do you know how much your workers get paid and any other kind of compensation they receive?
If you’re a subordinate (and I know this includes most bosses):
does your boss know how your complete compensation package works?
Just curious about the level of cluelessness out there, maybe I just happen to run into all the clueless ones. That would be nice, but I suspect it’s not the case.
I work for a mega-corp that specializes in benefits administration. I have the highest level of security clearance and can see most of what you listed for several million people. That certainly won’t be typical for your question. I am a boss and supervisor for people all over the world at different times. I can look at any of my coworker’s salary and benefits if I want. We use each other for test cases sometimes. At first, it seems cool but the novelty wears off fast. We bring consultants in all the time and I don’t give a rat’s ass how they get paid. It doesn’t affect my bank account and neither does it for new employees. New people come onto our team all the time and I don’t care what they have. That is up to the company. If they have a question about compensation, vacation, sick time, personal days, or benefits then I will help them find the right person to ask about it.
I don’t remember off hand the salary, leave etc of each member of my staff but I understand the company compensation system and I would make sure I know what an individual is getting before I discussed it with them. It’s the same rule as any meeting - you make sure you know what you’re talking about before you open your mouth - and dealing with the people you’re relying on to actually deliver against your own objectives makes it even more important.
I’m a supervisor. I have an idea of what my other employees make, including one who just got a well-deserved raise and promotion, but I can’t tell you off the top of my head to the penny what everyone makes. I am involved with my boss in the review process of the employees, but when it comes to setting percentages of raises, my boss does that. I do not, nor do I want to, know what the other supervisor in our department makes.
That said, yes, my boss does know how much I make and how much vacation time I have.
For salary, of course. When I was a manager before, compensation decisions were made in a meeting of first level managers and our boss - the final decision was always made two levels up, and approved one level above that. We got salary data on everyone. Back 20 years ago we used spreadsheets, today there is an on-line compensation tool, and other tools for bonuses and stock options.
Most of the benefits are automatically computed from salary and (for vacation) time of service, so I doubt many managers have that. Vacation is handled by a web app which gives an email to me and my boss when I request vacation. I think he can see what I have left - our vacation gets incremented every pay period, so it is pretty dynamic.
I don’t understand what hotel bills have to do with compensation. Our airline tickets are prepaid, and I enter the amount into our app which creates travel expense reporting. My boss approves it, but the receipts go to a travel office.
Partly yes. My (main) boss sets my salarfy, so he knows how much I make. But the (lesser) boss I go to for vacation days doesn´t know (and has no right to know, actually) how much I make.
Otoh, the main boss hasn’t got a clue about the vacation days instead.
I interact with both of them daily, but one (the lesser one) is head of the office and the other one is the head of the department.
I know what each of my subordinates makes and what PTO they have available, etc. Oddly, two of my subordinates, who were in the department before me highly resent that I know these things and even tried to keep the info from me when I first started in that department. The company I work for has grown in size, nearly doubled, in the three years I’ve been there and these two particular ladies seem to believe that my boss and the owner of the company should be “in the know” but that it isn’t my business to know these things.
It’s an issue stemming from the fact that one of the ladies has been in the department for a long time and will never be the department manager.
Since I work for a government agency all salaries are public record. Any other allowances are part of a contract and negotiated. So yes, my boss knows.
I used to work with a woman who thought herself superior to everyone else on the basis that she’d worked there longer than all but five of the people in the department. That and she’d been personally hired by the Director based on a personal relationship and NOT based on her actually being qualified to do the job.
She had been there three weeks longer than one of the supervisors, and somehow believed that this made her Senior to that supervisor and therefore, above him.
When our then-current supervisor got promoted, she made it abundantly clear to everyone that the new supervisor would never be allowed to tell her what to do, because she had been there too long and no new person was going to be in charge of her!
She didn’t last too much longer after that last one.
Back on Nava’s OP;
That would seem to me to be some rather poor training, preparation and followup on the part of that Supervisor’s superiors. Most people don’t come in knowing how to do those sorts of things, it has to be taught as part of their job training.
Other than well, the vacation thing. That’s just bad math skills. That’s the kind of person who will lower your pay while increasing your number of hours, then claim that it’s a Good Thing, because you’re making more money in the end!
When I was a supervisor (not something I have to do anymore, thank goodness!) I knew exactly how much my subordinates made and how much their benefits package came to on top of that. I didn’t know the exact breakdown of the benefits, but I knew the sum total on top of salary. That was important because it came out of my budget, and I had to write grant proposals that would account for everything the organization spent on the employee.
I’m pretty sure that my current boss knows how much I make, but beyond that, he probably doesn’t care how the rest of the compensation package works out.
Company would pay “travel expenses,” including among other things lunch. Hotel bills, meal tickets, taxi tickets, plane tickets, etc. all had to be handed in if they were for 25$ or more. We couldn’t choose our own hotels or flights, the corporate travel office did it for us. We were allowed to request specific hotels or flights, but in general we were supposed to prove that it would actually be cheaper than the one the travel office wanted to assign (or than a more-expensive one to which you were entitled by company policy, for example “yes, the NY-Sao Paulo flight is more expensive than the Phil-Dallas-Sao Paulo, but since I’m going to work directly from the plane, I can ask for Business Class, and Business Phil-Dallas-SP is more expensive than Tourist NY-SP. So get me the direct flight, please shark smile over phone”)
In Spain:
Companies pay “travel expenses.” They often pay for big item tickets directly (hotel, flight tickets), rather than have the worker pay for it and go through a reimbursement process. For small items, there can be a reimbursement system (so the worker has to keep all tickets and give them or legally-acceptable copies to the company) or a per diem (saves time and paperwork but it’s treated differently taxation-wise).
Some companies also have “lunch tickets” or a “lunch per diem” as part of their benefits package. Lunch tickets are private money, each ticket is worth a certain amount but it can only be used at those restaurants which accept them.
I’m a director, at the peak last year, I had 141 people working for me. When someone came to me, I had a general sense of what s/he made at that level. The more expensive the employee, the more likely I was to know the specifics of his/her contracts.
I wouldn’t always know the intricacies of individual benefits off the top of my hat. Not surprisingly, each individual employee has a better grasp of issues like that as they affect him/her directly.
I work for a large government entity (the post office), so the rates of pay for everybody from the kids hired as Christmas casuals to the CEO are known and published (executive bonuses not so much, though).
Not having full freedom to choose a hotel or flight is now pretty common in big companies, because they often get kickbacks from contracts with hotels and airlines that make the fares cheaper than they appear. In every place I’ve worked flights had to be booked through the corporate travel agency. Now the website we book on gives you the “approved” flight, and then you get to looker for lower cost options, which are usually both better and cheaper. I think this was because people could prove that they could get cheaper flights on their own.
I know people from IBM who have been forced to stay in hotels quite far from a meeting because of a company approved hotel only policy.
Interesting about Spain - thanks.
I know what my associates earn, and (approximately) what their other benefits are. I make the decision as to what their raises will be, and my boss (and her boss) approve them if they are not out of line (they never have been.) My boss knows what I earn as well as making the decision what my raises will be. Expense reimbursements are handled by accounting, but my boss has approval rights up to a certain dollar amount as far as them being charged against her budget.
So, no, managers here are not clueless for the most part, and HR has our backs on the rest.
To be honest, I don’t understand this either. If you work 12h shifts and have an equal amount of total vacation time, you should only have 2/3 as many vacation days as someone working 8h shifts, where Vacation Days = Vacation Hours / Hours Per Day. Are you referring to every day you don’t work – including weekends and/or regularly scheduled off-days – as “vacation days”? It would make sense in that context, but I’ve not heard that usage (admittedly, I’m not familiar with European phrasings).
When I worked as a supervisor, both at the restaurant and at the bank, I did have access to salary and benefit information, though I didn’t know it off the top of my head. I did understand the factors that went into determining these for each employee, so if you locked my file cabinet and stole my computer, I could make a fairly accurate guess based on years of service, performance level, etc. I would be surprised to find a company where managers would not be expected to know this about their direct reports (now, whether they live up to those expectations is another story).
In some companies, including two I’ve worked for, supervisory duties are split between salaried managers and hourly supervisors, with the latter being the day-to-day contacts who may also approve vacation and schedules. In these situations, the hourly supervisors will usually not (officially) know the details about their “employees’” compensation and benefits. Of course, I imagine you’d have mentioned it if this were the case in your scenarios, in which case, I got nothin’. You just have bad luck with managers, I suppose.