By now you’ve heard or read about the $250 bonus PwC is paying to employees each time they take a full week’s vacation for the next year. Now Mazars USA is throwing its hat into the “pay your employees to go away” ring.
Mazars sent an email to employees late last month explaining its new Appreciation and Wellbeing Bonus Program, which “applies to all employees who are with the firm on or before May 1, 2021.” According to the email, which was sent to us by a tipster, the firm wants everyone to have a “more unplugged experience over the summer months” (which given your job responsibilities and workloads seems highly unlikely) and “promoting time off that we can all use.”
The email goes on to say:
Our Partners and Leaders are mobilizing to plan, support and encourage use of our PDOs and this will take a good amount of communication, planning, and teamwork. We would also like to make a financial contribution to you, to recognize your commitment to the firm and help enhance your summer.
Either public accounting firms have some sort of guilt complex now for pushing their capital market servants to the brink of physical and mental collapse during the pandemic or they are freaking out about the public accounting exodus and are throwing money at employees in the hopes they’ll stick around.
Here’s the deal on the appreciation part of the bonus program:
All active employees on May 31st will have 10% added to their semi-monthly pay for the period ending May 31st. So, for example, if your gross compensation for that pay period is $3,000, your pay will be increased to $3,300. This is essentially the equivalent of a day’s pay. We will do the same for the semi-monthly payroll period ended June 30th for eligible active employees as of that date. (Note that hourly, interns and reduced work arrangement employees are all eligible.)
And here’s the deal on the wellbeing portion of the bonus program:
Any employee who utilizes PDOs across five consecutive business days (a week of vacation), during the period from May 16th to August 15th, will receive an additional day of pay in their August 31st semi-monthly payroll, similar to the example above.
In summary, if you are employed at Mazars from May 1st through August 31st and take a week’s vacation, you can receive up to 3 extra days’ worth of compensation.
I’m assuming most Mazars employees who read this email thought, “OK, that’s nice and all, but what about raises and bonuses this year?” That too was addressed by leadership:
We received questions after our last town hall regarding insight on the 2021 raises and bonuses, which we addressed in the FAQs, but would like to highlight again here.
In summary, we have planned and budgeted for raises and bonuses for client-facing professionals to be distributed in September 2021 and for our non-client-facing professionals and administrative support team members in December 2021. These are consistent with past practices.
The totals provided in our budgets, are at levels above last year. As with all compensation adjustments, the amounts awarded to each employee are based on their individual performance. For our client-facing professionals, the awards will be based on an annual performance period ending May 31st and for non-client-facing professionals and administrative support team members, they will be based on PATH reviews through November 30th.
We want to assure you that the Appreciation and Wellbeing Bonus Program outlined above, is in addition to amounts already included in our budget with respect to the annual raise and bonus pool for this year-end.
The Partners of Mazars US thank you for your continued hard work, commitment, and dedication and we appreciate you and your wellbeing. We hope you enjoy some well-deserved time off and we look forward to connecting with you in person again soon.
Give the leadership at Mazars some credit for making an effort to reward employees for going well above and beyond their normal job duties the past 14 months or so, and we hope said employees are compensated handsomely for all their work later this year.
How ya feeling Mazarsians about what your firm said about raises and bonuses, as well as the appreciation and wellbeing bonuses?
Related article:
Guy Speculates On How PwC Decided to Give $250 Vacation Bonus to Employees
