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Bonus Watch ’21: At Least Deloitte U.K. Gave Its Employees Money As a Thank You Gift Instead of a Lame Pizza Party

For some reason Big 4 partners think buying their capital market servants pizza will make everything all better. Here, have a free slice of pepperoni or two as a token of our appreciation for working those 80-plus hours last week. Your employees are adults, not elementary school children.

But some of my favorite public accounting-related memes have to do with partners’ infatuation with pizza parties:

Well at the Queen’s Deloitte, upper management must have vetoed any pizza parties that partners wanted to give employees to thank them for all the hard work they did during the pandemic.

Instead, U.K. Green Dotters will get a one-time bonus—ranging from £500 to £2,000, depending on seniority, at the end of April, Financial News reported:

The firm’s UK senior partner Richard Houston announced the payment during an all-staff webinar on 23 March, according to a person familiar with the matter. …

Houston also said the firm would roll back some of the austerity measures taken to save cash last year when the pandemic first hit.

The money-saving measures included temporarily cutting contributions the firm made to staff pensions from up to 12% of salary to 4.5%, freezing pay rises when staff were promoted and freezing salary reviews.

Pension contributions were cut from 1 July for 12 months, but Houston told staff on the call that increased payments would restart in June, a month earlier than planned.

Deloitte has 19,000 staff in the UK, meaning it stood to save millions of pounds by reducing the amount it contributed to staff pensions. Partners of the firm do not receive a pension.

And the good news kept coming: According to Financial News, Houston said promoted staff would receive backdated pay increases to the time of their promotion, salary reviews would resume this year, and 2021 financial year performance bonuses would be paid as usual.

Deloitte hands staff ‘thank you’ bonus of up to £2,000 as it rolls back cost-saving measures [Financial News]

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