An average salary increase this year of around 2% has emerged from the novel pay and reward model that Coillte and IMPACT agreed over two years ago. The pay increase was recently reported in the respected journal Industrial Relations News.

The agreement marked a departure from incremental pay awards, and IMPACT official Johnny Fox, representing Coillte staff, describes it as “a ground breaking deal” which ended pay relativity with the public service and aligned future pay increases to the market within a pay banding structure.

In 2013 Coillte members covered by the agreement received a market based pay increase of 0.55% and, added to performance pay, yielded average pay increases of just over 3%. In 2014 the market pay increase was 0.88% which yielded average pay increases of just over 3.5% (when added to performance related pay) for those members covered by the agreement.

Johnny explained, “Depending on the pay band, and the performance output, members covered by the agreement can achieve pay increases on top of the market pay increase of between 1.5% and 5%. This year also saw the first bonus payments which allow for annual payments of between 2.5% and 22% of basic salary for achieving 100% of set targets.”

The agreement also allows for a full review after two years and this is currently underway.

Johnny added, “The Coillte Branch has identified a number of areas of the agreement which they believe needs some adjustment, for example how performance targets and bonus targets are set and monitored. We expect that the review will conclude towards the end of the year, although a number of issues have arisen outside of the review and have been referred to the LRC for further discussion. These relate to some individual cases and, in particular, how the company sets salaries for the graduate development programme.”

Johnny says that, overall, the agreement has worked. “This year the expectation is that the market-based pay element should improve significantly as the economic outlook continues to improve. There is a continuing upward pay trend within the private sector, particularly among the agreed set of comparator companies. So we have very good reason to be optimistic” he said.