LOL, wow you must hire some gullible people if they just believe you and all of a sudden your magic workplace drama dies off instantly because your Uncle told them they just needed to 'do better'.
As I said, we had a benefits package that was entirely scaled towards seniority with no adjustments for anyone - total compensation for those older employees getting less per hour was still technically higher, that quite possibly is part of why it wasn't an issue.
And frankly, considering our average raise given out at reviews (with $1/hr being the max, remember) was $0.70/hr for my last location - it really wasn't "shooting for the moon" that they'd catch up. Flipping through my employee Excel I still have (the date seems to be two months before I left, I guess I didn't enter my last few months - or maybe no one came up for review/whatever - I don't recall) - over 1300 reviews done for the 434 hourly employees we had at that location in the 27 months recorded there [22 open, 5 pre-open training] I see sixteen cases of a $0.10/hr raise, twelve of a review being delayed (if reviews came up while you had active warnings, we skipped that review - effectively you'd get a $0.00/hr review but not how we pitched it), and 393 reviews that were given a $1.00/hr raise.
So just shy of 25% "chance" for a decent employee to pull of - and even then the average wasn't far off.
And I wouldn't tell them they need to do better, I'd just remind them that our raises were generous and it likely wasn't too far off for them if they didn't start to slack. [Nor was any family of mine involved in my business - in fact, I'm not aware of anyone even in my extended family that did my same field or even company type - the Uncle reference is pointless....]
Also, we did reviews twice a year - so that was a potential of $2/hr annually closing the gap ($1.40/hr of closing the gap on average).
Honestly, we had almost no drama at the workplace entirely - funny that a professional environment that's kept that way tends to avoid such things - I also only dealt with maybe 15-20 "dating incidents" over fifteen years too even though you see them as a common thing on TV and such. (And remember, most of my time was with 200-450 person locations - only my first three years when I was proving myself trustworthy for openings did I deal with 50-100 man locations) We also had shrink around half what the industry average, rarely had complaints from customers about mistreatment, etc. I get this feeling you've never been in a Wegman's or one of the other groceries that share their philosophies across the nation. (Kroger and Publix being two companies that actually were on the same page enough to consider themselves allies from what we were told)
Great compensation with no unions to protect bad employees really makes for people that tend to love their work and work appropriately for it. Even our worst paid employee would be getting $2/hr less and worse benefits the minute they walked out the door and went to a competing union place - and the union would be stealing a portion of their wage and be getting slower reviews and raises. At least until we slowed down reviews after hitting "peak wage" (we had a softcap on wages basically - once you hit X in a position - $20/hr as a cashier for example) reviews went to annually at half the normal rate instead of biannually at the normal rate. Some other compensation still continued to scale though, vacation for example only capped after 30 years.
I believe someone did the math and if you knew for a fact you'd stick for 20-25 yrs the unions were better for the employee - but until then we trumped them. And most people don't plan for 20-25 years.
