Laura
It’s a tricky area, isn’t it?
The first thing to do is to implement the TAA model policy on the Payment of Staff. To determine the annual salary rise, we look at CPI (never RPI), AWE and Google for surveys on ‘typical private sector pay rises’, in October each year – take an average and discuss it in our Finance Committee. Then we revisit our decision in March, just before the 1 April start of our pay year.
Benchmarking of salaries is almost non-existent in the almshouse world, although the Wessex Almshouse Group (or WAG, details on the TAA local meetings page) does a triennial benchmark survey. However, of the 50 potential responders, only 17 contributed to this year’s survey.
Have you tried chatting to your peers in other almshouses nearby? The discussions don’t have to be entirely dry and transactional – they can evolve into very useful, convivial, networking meetings (as has WAG).
Some people have looked for remuneration parallels in Local Government salary rates. And given that the job of a Clerk is similar to that of a (small, prep-school) boarding school bursar (albeit on a much smaller scale and with a totally different demographic!), you could extrapolate from their salaries.
One consideration would be to reward above-and-beyond performance with only a non repeating bonus. Raising salary for one-off good work locks that increase in, while continually awarding one-off bonuses is a contradiction in terms and ‘hard bakes’ them into the recipient’s pay.
Happy to chat further if you wish.
Nick Stiven
clerk@stjohnswilton.org.uk