Employee Pay Increases Outpacing Executives'.

• Position: Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

For the first time since 1982, officers and executives are projected to receive a smaller salary increase than top exempt employees this year. According to preliminary numbers from the WorldatWork Total Salary Increase Budget Survey, exempt salaried employees can expect a 4.5% increase in 2001, compared to 4.4% for the officer/executive category. WorldatWork, a not-for-profit association of compensation, benefits, and human resource professionals, based its preliminary data on an electronic sampling of a portion of the more than 2,500 survey participants. The complete results will be released later this year.

"What this tells us is that the importance of attraction and retention of key talent is reaching all aspects of compensation, benefits, and total rewards," indicates Anne C. Ruddy, executive director of WorldatWork. "We suspect a big part of this shift is due to the addition of IT [information technology] talent in the exempt employee category."

Reflecting the U.S. economic slowdown, salary increase numbers are showing a downturn in their growth rate over the next year in all four categories: nonexempt hourly nonunion, nonexempt salaried, exempt salaried, and officers/executives. The growth rate of each of the categories (with the...