Even a small salary increase could be your best business expense

Businesses have many assets that contribute to the growth and competitive advantages of the company, but none are more important than its human capital. Every night the human resources that drive the productivity of a company walk out the door and in the morning they choose to come back. Business owners and leaders that are conscious of this choice understand that employees need to be treated well enough that they continue to contribute the majority of their waking hours to greater good of the company.

Not every company can afford the lavish perks offered by tech leaders like Google and Facebook with their gourmet catered meals, fully featured gyms, and an abundance of company swag. The bare minimum that a company can do is at the end of each year they can thank an employee for a job well done (provided that it is deserving) and then offer a raise in salary that at least offsets any increases in cost of living.

Out of pure curiosity to understand how many people in Singapore actually received a raise in the last year, I decided to find out with a survey. Using SurveyMonkey, I collected responses from 371 people in Singapore. The responses were evenly split between male and female and included a cross-section of all ages and races.

After filtering out at anyone that said they were not employed (either retired or simply unemployed), I looked at how people answered my question of whether they received a raise in the last year. Shockingly, only 60 percent did, in fact, get an increase in salary! I had not expected the percentage of people that received a raise to be so low, so I had not adequately prepared my survey with the right follow-up questions. I would have liked to have asked whether those that did not receive a raise were disappointed or if maybe they received some other new perk, but this will have to be discovered in another survey.

Nonetheless, my additional follow-up question was just as telling. I asked respondents how likely they were to look for a new job this year. Not surprisingly at all, those that did not get a raise were significantly more likely to look for new employment with 17 percent saying they were "extremely likely."

Slicing the data by age and gender revealed some interesting insights. Employees in the 35 to 44 bracket received the biggest chunk of raises while those older than 55 represented the largest basket of raises not given. Additionally, females seemed to receive more raises than males.

There are of course many ways to reward valuable employees but increasing salary compensation is usually the most common. While there are a select few people that go to work every day simply because they love what they do, everyone else just wants to get paid. Sweetening employee salaries every year even with a token amount seems like a small price to pay to retain an employee and avoid the cost of having to hire and train a replacement.