Some of the chatter I'm hearing (regarding reasons for changing the system) has to do with how taking sick time has to do with the now obsolete performance review is done.
When an Express employee takes sick time, it is counted against their performance review - meaning that they take a significant hit in their rating even for taking a single sick day in a year. The way the metric worked, taking a sick day resulted in an employee dropping from a "7" for attendance to a "6" - which means that in the final weighted score, an employee would automatically take a 0.2 hit to their score. This may seem insignificant, but due to the pay increase percentage being HEAVILY weighted towards the incremental differences between 6.5 and 7.0, a 0.2 hit towards an employees final score would result in a pay raise which was 0.6% less than it otherwise would be.
For an employee making say $18.00/hr, this hit (for taking a single sick day) would result in losing 11 cents/hr from whatever pay increase was coming their way the next cycle. For a full-timer, this would work out to losing $229 in wages for EACH AND EVERY YEAR that they otherwise would be receiving that "extra" 11 cents an hour. Since this amount of lost pay increase wasn't automatically "caught up" in following years, the employee would in essence be PERMANENTLY penalized for taking that single sick day.
Looking at this over the long term, assuming the employee works another 10 years (or tops out 10 years after taking this illustrative sick day), the employee would lose a total of $2,300 in compensation over their career/remaining time- for taking a single sick day!! I hope this illustrates to new employees why mid-range employees were loathe to take a sick day unless they were on the verge of death.
This was always the issue of taking a sick day while in Express. Those who looked at their compensation through the lens I illustrated KNEW that taking a sick day would cost them FAR beyond the "loss" of the end of fiscal year payout for that day taken - they would take a hit to their annual review and the loss to their pay increase (when accumulated over time till they hit topout or left the company) would cost them dearly.
The problem was that this issue DIDN'T present itself for topped out employees. Since all they had to worry about was receiving a review score that would garner a pay increase that was at least equal to the increase to the topout for the position (usually a 5.0 score was all that they needed) topped out employees didn't have this concern that those that weren't topped out had.
I know of no other major corporation which penalizes its wage employees for taking sick time. I and others believe that this issue may have something to do with the reason for the change. Express always stated (even in HR posters) that employees should take sick time if they beleive they are contagious with some illness, but there was NO WAY for the employee to prevent taking a negative hit on their review if they indeed took a sick day. There wasn't even a way to prevent a hit to the review even if the employee presented a "doctor's note". I often was presented with the situation of being severely ill and trying to make the decision as to whether to call in sick or try to make it through the day.
Again, this is speculative, since there has been no definitive information come out yet. Most ops managers only received notification of the policy change a week and a half ago, and even that was merely a heads up, not an exhaustive explanation as to why the change or how the change is going to affect the wage employees. Since (from what I'm hearing) there isn't a rush to get in last minute performance reviews before September 1, the March pay increases should be done entirely with the new system.
I would anticipate this resulting in people being MUCH more willing to take a sick day if they are sick (or just want a "break", ahem) and not worrying about the consequences to their compensation.
However, this whole system has me thinking of the adage - "Beware of strangers bearing gifts". For all the seeming improvements to the method of determining pay increases, there has to be something else brewing within Express which will be revealed soon after this system is "nailed down". I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that this is part of a bigger picture (of which my postings regarding operational changes are part of), but I can't help but think that there is indeed some linkage between this change in how compensation is going to be determined and how Express is going to reorganize. Just too damn much happening too quickly for it to be coincidental.