Salary increases for office support staff in the past year have been "less than spectacular" and staff turnover is the same as last year. That's according to the 19th annual SecsLife survey from Gordon Yates, recruiter of skilled office support staff.

Less than 1% of support staff enjoyed a pay rise of 10% over the year. The most common band for pay rises was 3-4.99%, which accounted for 55% of staff responding to the survey.

Richard Grace, joint managing director of Gordon Yates, said: "With a robust and broadly buoyant trading climate, we had expected to see salary levels striding ahead. Anecdotal evidence from around the market lent some weight to this assumption. Surprisingly, however, our survey reveals steady but hardly spectacular average salary increases. With Retail Price Index inflation running at 3.6% in September 2006, salaries in real terms are much the same level as last year."

The increases took the average office manager's salary to £25,408. Receptionists remain the lowest-paid category of office staff at £16,290. Certain staff, who give support to a team of people and often have Microsoft Office skills, have seen their salaries grow to £19,916. Yates believes this may now be the biggest category of staff, with only 18% of staff working for one boss. About 37% are working for six or more bosses.

The survey also found that levels of staff turnover were lower than expected. Grace said: "In past years, strong economic conditions have tended to erode staff tenure. The wealth of job opportunities during such times acts like a magnet, drawing people more frequently into new jobs."

But he added: "Again, this is not the picture painted by this year's survey results. The indications are that support staff are staying longer with their company and changing jobs less often."

About 51% of support staff stay with a company for less than three years. Yates said that staff turnover had stayed the same for about 69% of employers, with 19% reporting an increase and 12% a decrease.

He said organisations appear to be retaining good people without getting caught up in an upward spiral of salary costs. One reason for this might be an increased investment in the training of support staff. Spending in this also rose in 2005. Yates said that the re-branding of "training" as "learning and development" seems to have created a new impetus. Some 27% of employers increased spending on training for office support staff during the year, with 70% keeping it unchanged and 3% reducing it. However, about 22% spend nothing on training. Some 32% of permanent support staff and 50% of temporary support staff are graduates.

Gordon Yates's survey also asked employers to anticipate the level of staff changes for the coming year. It said the responses point to a "further steady growth in demand for talented, experienced support staff — at a similar, if slightly slower, pace than in the past year".



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