Employers in Ukraine are increasingly offering additional financial compensation, annual bonuses and other benefits.
Foreign and domestic companies working in Ukraine are beginning to dish out benefit packages in order to retain their employees in an increasingly competitive labor market.
According to a study conducted by Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four international auditing and accounting firms, demand for highly qualified specialists in various fields is rising in Ukraine, along with the mobility of prized personnel.
The study, released on Feb. 12, surveyed some 130 leading companies, both Ukrainian and foreign-owned, providing a glimpse, rather than a comprehensive analysis, of trends affecting top employers.
Employers in Ukraine are increasingly offering additional financial compensation, annual bonuses and other benefits to retain staff and attract new personnel, the study claims.
“In particular, 89 percent of the companies pay annual bonuses, compared to 2005 when the percentage of such companies equaled to 73 percent,” the study reads.
“In 2006, 32 percent of companies participating in the survey provided their employees with flexible working schedules and 8 percent offered work-at-home, providing them with the necessary equipment and communication means.”
Anastasiya Koryttseva, a senior consultant in human capital at the Kyiv offices of Ernst & Young, said that more and more Ukrainian and foreign companies are beginning to realize that in order to grow they must battle for highly-qualified personnel. And this means offering prized employees more in terms of benefit packages and other incentives intended to keep them within the company, she said.
“Leading companies owe their leading positions in part to the fact that they have sophisticated incentive strategies and provide their employees with diversified compensation packages,” she said.
Koryttseva said that most Ukrainian companies, private as well as state-owned, are only starting to develop their personnel motivation policy. In the past, the value of such policies have been largely underestimated.
According to the Ernst & Young Survey, the minimum blue-collar salary in a foreign company in Ukraine is about $200 a month on average. Salaries for white-collar employees can be much higher.
State figures show that the average official monthly salary in Ukraine grew by 28.2 percent last year alone. Monthly salaries offered in the financial sector are among the highest, averaging about $525. The lowest salaries, meanwhile, are found in the agriculture and health services sectors, where the average is around $120-160 per month.Kyiv continues to boast the best-paid labor force in the country, with average salaries in the $370 range. The capital is followed by the highly industrialized Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, where average monthly salaries stand at about $220-250 per month. The lowest average monthly salary, $156, is in western Ukraine’s Ternopil Region, where high-paying jobs are scarce.
