As someone who is responsible for these kinds of decisions, this is actually the most uncomfortable part of my job, and that's not because I'm not good with peo

As someone who is responsible for these kinds of decisions, this is actually the most uncomfortable part of my job, and that's not because I'm not good with people or have issues talking about money. It's because there is no single socially acceptable way of handling this, and people differ wildly over what they expect of the company. As someone who employs developer's, I'm often in a position where starting the conversation with one employee because it's on his quarterly schedule can trigger another employee to question his relative position and start a job hunt because he just had his evaluation talks and the results he was happy with then don't look so great now. Similar things happened with a general fixed sum raise for the whole team, where once everyone's numbers changed people wanted to be treated differently compared to their colleagues... Currently I'm following a "to-each-his-own" philosophy, where we try to reach a market Level for each employees, and then try to give whatever the employee actually needs for his prefered Lifestyle, be it remote-work with a package of paid airplane tickets, or a company loan, or more holiday days... but this is also not perfect since it's often down to the creativity of the employee and the Manager/hr, but also because these packages tend to have a "Grass is greener" side of things as employees get jealous of other employees perks while forgetting their own benefits... I've yet to find a frustration free system of compensation negotiation that leads to the one thing that's most important for my companies, retaining talent and team spirit.