Separate remediation pot or adjustments folded into the annual pay review?

We got a separate pot approved by changing what we asked for. Instead of a one-off 1.4 million, we asked for a standing line of 0.2% of base payroll, held centrally, released by compensation and not by managers, effective on a different date from merit. Ours go in on 1 October; merit is 1 April.

Finance were comfortable because unspent money returns to them, and because after the initial correction the annual need fell to about 0.08%.

The separate date matters as much as the budget. The employee gets a letter that says this is a correction, not a reward, and the manager has nothing to trade it against.

In a unionised setting check what your agreements say before you pick a date or a mechanism. Our nursing contract in the Pacific Northwest required us to bargain the correction method, which added four months. We took counsel's advice on that and I would not have guessed it.

Different view: we do fold it in, but as a ring-fenced first call on the budget. Compensation loads the corrections before managers see their pot, so the manager's allocation is already net and they cannot touch the equity money. It is less clean than a separate date, but our finance team would never have approved a second cycle.

Going with the standing line and an October effective date. I took the 0.2% framing to our finance lead on Thursday and the conversation was completely different from the one about a 1.1 million one-off. We will check the bargaining point for the two represented units before anything is announced.