DURHAM – It’s not just Google employees based in Durham’s new engineering hub that appear to have concerns about how the company structures compensation packages and career growth opportunities for its workforce.

According to reporting from Business Insider and CNBC, the annual employee surveys conducted by the tech giant show that there’s been an increasing level of dissatisfaction with compensation packages relative to other, similar roles.

The surveys were conducted in January, according to CNBC, and the media organization noted in their report that they’d viewed the company’s results overall as well as broken down by business unit.

According to CNBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai relayed to employees in an email that the annual survey is “one of the most important ways” the company measures satisfaction.

Reports: Google is lowering compensation in Triangle; employees are petitioning

Growing dissatisfaction

There’s a clear business case for keeping employees satisfied, as more technology jobs, including in North Carolina, are open now than ever before.  And more and more people chose to leave the workforce in 2021 than ever before.

A year ago, 58% of Google’s surveyed employees said that their total compensation package was competitive compared to other, similar roles at other, similar companies.  But this year, fewer than half of respondents agreed, as only 46% agree, according to CNBC.

Last month, Google employees based in the Triangle opened a petition that asked the company to “reverse the pay band cut, “reverse the equity cut,” and “make any future salary and compensation decisions transparent and tied to publicly available data.”

That petition was launched after Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had restructured compensation for three markets, including North Carolina.

Prior reporting on WRAL TechWire describes how the company’s Triangle-based workers were reassigned by Alphabet into a category known as “discount.”  That’s according to the letter and petition.  Though employees were notified of the decision in “late 2020,” the employee petition notes a belief that there was “no transparency into the data used in this decision.”

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