half of SMEs plan to increase salaries in 2022, according to a Bpifrance barometer

Half of the managers of very small businesses (TPE) and SMEs plan to increase the salaries of their employees in 2022: this is one of the lessons of a quarterly barometer published on Wednesday February 23 by the public bank Bpifrance and the institute Rexecode.

>> Purchasing power: SME bosses were asked if they intended to raise wages to compensate for inflation

While recruitment difficulties are the first obstacle to the activity of SMEs, these salary increases are three-quarters motivated by the desire to retain employees, according to the results of the survey conducted from January 31 to February 9. with more than 600 SMEs and VSEs in the non-agricultural market sectors.

Of the half of those companies planning to raise wages this year, 63% believe the increase will be higher than the average for the three years before the Covid-19 crisis, and 33% of the same magnitude. Of the other half, who won’t raise salaries, 57% say they have insufficient results to do so, but 48% say they want to “favor the granting of remuneration ancillary to the salary” such as bonuses, profit-sharing or participation.

On the other hand, a majority (58%) of managers of SMEs and VSEs “plan to increase their selling prices in 2022”still according to the barometer which specifies that among them, 88% envisage a rise in their prices higher than that of the last three years before the crisis.

For SMEs, which represent 30% of employment in the market sector in France (excluding agriculture and finance), “today we have a little more price increases than wages, which shows that there is no automatic adjustment yet” wages on prices that could lead to an inflationary spiral feared by some economists, explained to AFP Baptiste Thornary, head of economic studies at Bpifrance.