Baltimore Company Stuns Employees With $10 Million In Bonuses

St. John Properties in Baltimore, MD, is seeing to it that its 198 employees are going to have a great holiday season.

At the company’s holiday party this past week, it thanked its employees for the overall production of 20 million square feet of office, retail and warehouse space by offering up a $10 million bonus pool for its employees, according to MarketWatch. 

The bonus checks came to an average of about $50,000 per person and were based on the amount of years people had been with the company. “Everybody is important in this company, and everybody performs in this company,” founder and chairman Edward St. John said at the company’s holiday party last week. 

The bonuses handed out were on top of other year-end bonuses the company offered.

But St. John’s Properties looks more and more like it is the exception from the norm when it comes to holiday bonuses this year. 

According to a survey from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, fewer and fewer companies are offering performance based bonuses in recent years. 

About 10% of companies surveyed said they would give bonuses to all staff based on company performance this year. That number is down from almost 19% in 2015. 

About 24% of companies said that bonuses would be given to select workers. This is down from 37.5% in 2015.

The same survey – which polled 250 companies – shows that the share of companies awarding bonuses of $100 or less, in cash or gift cards, is increasing to 20%, from 12.5%. Other non-monetary gifts, like an extra vacation day or a gift basket (because that’ll help pay the rent) are also up, to 11% from 6.3% in 2015.

On Wall Street, employees probably aren’t hoping for a repeat of last year. The 2018 average bonus in the NY Securities Industry last year was $153,700, which was down nearly 17% from $184,400 in 2017. 

Andrew Challenger, vice president at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said: “The decline in season’s end gifts was uneven. Based on anecdotes, bonuses in finance, real estate and construction were strong, but slipping in retail and manufacturing.”