After Microsoft halts pay rise for employees, CMO's message on how to ensure salary hike

Chris Capossela reaches out to employees amid anger over the company's move to pause salary hike for full-time workers.

To get a pay rise at Microsoft, people must work to make the company's stock ‘go higher,’ said chief marketing officer (CMO) Chris Capossela, with his message coming at a time when employees are angry with the tech giant over its move to freeze salary hike for full-time workers.

Microsoft CMO Chris Capossela (File Photo/Business Today)

“The most important lever for almost all of our employees' compensation upside is the stock price. So, great quarterly results contribute to making the stock attractive, which, in turn, drives everyone's total compensation up,” Fortune quoted Capossela as saying in an internal communication to employees.

“Microsoft still continues to invest heavily in its people, and its data centre capacity, to hopefully position it well for the artificial intelligence (AI) transformation,” said Capossela.

‘A slap in the face’

Earlier this month, CEO Satya Nadella broke the news in an internal email to employees. The move was necessary to help navigate ‘macroeconomic ructions,’ and to generate ‘enough yield’ to invest in the major platform shift towards AI, noted Nadella.

“Though we will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages,” he wrote in the email.

In a now-deleted tweet, Isabel Moreira, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, had denounced its decision as a ‘slap in the face.’

Microsoft layoffs

Also, in January, the Bill Gates co-founded organisation announced it will terminate 10,000 workers accounting for less than 5% of its then overall staff strength. This was done to align its cost structure with revenue, and with its projected customer demand.