65% of employees think companies lack transparency on pay levels: survey

But 64% also claim to be satisfied about their salaries.

Only 35% of employees agree that their pay levels show transparency, but 64% claimed to be ‘satisfied’ and ‘very satisfied’ about their salaries, according to the Hays Asia Salary Guide.

This has shown that the satisfaction rates on salary levels have improved from the 51% who said the same in 2018. However, employees seem to have raised concerns over the transparency of pay level setting.

“With the economy growing, business activity increasing and hiring levels rising, employees may begin to wonder why this improvement is not being passed on to them in terms of compensation packages, perhaps leading them to look elsewhere to rival organisations that may potentially meet their salary expectations,” said Dean Stallard, managing director at Hays Greater Bay Area.

Hays also reported that one in 10 (11%) employees did not get to experience salary increases over the last year. However, this rise is fractional and still below the Asia average of 15%.

In addition, signalling salary inertia in Hong Kong was the rise in employers reporting conservative increases of up to 3%. In 2018, 27% of employers had intended salary raises by this marginal amount, but this figure leaps to 35% in 2019.

Hays also mentioned that companies are looking to address the aforementioned concerns by compensating employees through alternative means, and employers who stated that they offered no bonus as part of remuneration packages fell from 13% to 7%.

Furthermore, the percentage of staff likely to receive bonuses is also on the rise (93% in 2019 vs 88% in 2018).

A rising trend of non-monetary benefits in Hong Kong is the provision of an extra vacation day on employees’ birthdays. Whilst the rest of Asia lags in adopting such practice, with only 18% of companies providing it, almost one third (32%) of Hong Kong employers offer this additional annual leave.