Microsoft is changing up its annual rewards and performance programs today, and offering long-serving employees in the US the ability to voluntarily retire. It\u2019s the first time in Microsoft\u2019s more than 50-year history that the company has offered such a voluntary retirement program.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,\u201d says Microsoft\u2019s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. \u201cFor those who may be considering their next chapter, we\u2019re offering a one\u2011time Voluntary Retirement Program.\u201d Microsoft says it applies to only a \u201csmall percentage of our US employees.\u201d<\/p>\n
US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include \u201cgenerous company support.\u201d It\u2019s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft\u2019s new financial year in July.<\/p>\n
Microsoft is also changing how it rewards employees with performance-related bonuses and stock. A more simplified rewards program reduces pay points from nine to five levels, and there\u2019s no curve involved so Microsoft isn\u2019t returning to the unpopular stack ranking system.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re also changing how stock is awarded, moving away from it being directly tied to bonus, so managers have more flexibility to meaningfully recognize high performance,\u201d says Coleman. That could help retain some of the talent that Microsoft has been losing through executive departures recently, allowing managers to offer up additional stock without it having to be tied to the bonus schedule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft is changing up its annual rewards and performance programs today, and offering long-serving employees in the US…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,1281,3,172],"class_list":{"0":"post-601942","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-microsoft","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}