Raises/promotions can be easy, you pay what you have to in order to retain the employee... as long as there is the money to do so AND as long as the company wants to retain said employee.
It's 90% about what they could get somewhere else in the city and a bit whether they are willing to leave and capable to (it's actually quite difficult to get a job ^^). You should have a pretty good idea of the what's available in the area after a while.
As you noticed, everybody think they deserve more. Ironically everybody is wrong, because the fact that they work here for this amount is proof that it's enough (for now), if they could get paid more they'd be paid more (whether here or somewhere else).
The key is to ignore people because people are always dissatisfied. Big companies set a fixed pay band and reply to everything with "there's no budget for a raise" because it's the nice easy way to do that.
We distribute 80% of the companies profits among the employees, so by definition we pretty much always pay as much as we can. That still leaves the discussion open of how wages and promotions get balanced among the team. And even if the decision is “everyone gets the same share more”, some people feel like they should be getting more than the rest. And those people sometimes even feel rejected if you tell them that there’s not more money in the pool and if they want or need more, they need to go look elsewhere. Or they stick around and are silently disgruntled until at some point they explode, despite having had a voice and a vote in the matter (and actual agency in raising the profits, hence everyone’s wage).
It's 90% about what they could get somewhere else in the city and a bit whether they are willing to leave and capable to (it's actually quite difficult to get a job ^^). You should have a pretty good idea of the what's available in the area after a while.
As you noticed, everybody think they deserve more. Ironically everybody is wrong, because the fact that they work here for this amount is proof that it's enough (for now), if they could get paid more they'd be paid more (whether here or somewhere else).
The key is to ignore people because people are always dissatisfied. Big companies set a fixed pay band and reply to everything with "there's no budget for a raise" because it's the nice easy way to do that.