Remuneration & Benefits

Our approach to remuneration and benefits is to ensure employees are fairly remunerated and recognised for their contribution to the business. Set out below are the key elements of our remuneration system. 

Our Remuneration Approach

• Good performance is rewarded – poor performance is not.
• Overall business results influence individual remuneration.
• Criteria for pay reviews are transparent and conducted annually (or more often when required e.g. in response to a Government increase to the minimum wage).
• We have an internal review process to ensure we achieve internal and external comparability and fairness.
• Base salary positioning is typically market median of the relevant market/s.
• Our system is sustainable - we attract, retain and motivate people over the long term.
• We are objective - we will make full use of objective measures and moderation to achieve fairness.
• Fairness and consistency are critical - similar inputs will yield similar outputs.
• Affordability is important - we need to live within our means. This means we take into consideration what the economy is doing and the impact on our business.
   

Pay and Benefits

Our remuneration package includes pay and benefits as follows:

• Wages and Salaries: We pay competitive market rates. We regularly benchmark pay internally and externally to make sure what we pay reflects the market. 
  
  
• Benefits: We offer a range of benefits to employees including employer contributions to KiwiSaver, employee discount on vaping products. Employee Assistance Programme, management training, retails ales training and coaching and a standardised approach to leave and employment conditions for consistency and fairness.
  
  

Factors that drive pay reviews:

• Market movements;
• Pay trends;
• Our current alignment with the market;
• General economic indicators;
• Business performance;
• Affordability. 
  
  

Handling Requests for Pay Rises

Employees sometimes ask for a pay rise.  It’s important to respond promptly to such requests. 

Vape Merchant conducts an annual review of its salaries in Quarter 1 of every year. Unless special circumstances arises, generally, pay rises will not be approved outside the annual review period.

Approval for any increase must be signed by your manager accompanied by evidence and/or justification for the increase. 

Your response to a request for a pay rise should depend on the reasons given for wanting a pay rise:

• Requests based on change to job content

For changes in job content to warrant a pay increase, those changes need to have significantly increased the level of responsibility, complexity, decision making authority, skill or experience required. Simply adding more work of a similar level of complexity, responsibility doesn’t make the job ‘bigger’.  For example if the size of the person's team increases from 3 to 4 that probably doesn’t make it a significantly bigger job. 

• Requests based on wrong job description

An inaccurate job description wouldn’t justify a pay review unless the job was significantly ‘bigger’ than currently described and the pay rate had been set based on the ‘out of date’ information on the size and complexity of the job.  

• Requests based on an external job offer received

Occasionally employees say they have an external offer at a higher level of remuneration, and ask if you will match it for them to stay.  Discuss these requests with your manager and ask for information from the employee about the role so you can gain some understanding of the position compared to the employee’s current role. Experience shows that these employees often leave soon after, whatever your response.

• Requests based on the employee being a high performer

There must be good reason to justify such an increase, such as superior performance against deliverables, KPIs etc.