NEW YORK — General Electric Co. is the laboratory of American management. So when the company says it’s rethinking a bedrock tradition of corporate life — the annual raise — you can bet that corporate suites everywhere will be watching closely.
GE executives are reviewing whether annual updates to compensation are the best response to the achievements and needs of employees. The company may also scrap the longstanding and much-imitated system of rating staff on a five-point scale.
Decisions on both issues may come within the next several months, spokeswoman Valerie Van den Keybus said by phone.
‘‘We uncovered an opportunity to improve the way we reward people for their contributions,’’ said Janice Semper, GE’s head of executive development. She said it will involve ‘‘being flexible and rethinking how we define rewards, acknowledging that employees and managers are already thinking beyond annual compensation in this space.’’
In the upper reaches of the US labor market, a broader shift in benefits is already under way. Businesses are competing over younger workers for whom other perks may be as important as pay, and senior employees looking for more flexibility as they near retirement.
To lure and retain talent, they’re ready to reconsider everything from parental leave and paid time off to when and how performance is rated.
Netflix said last year that employees can take a year off for child care, and many more companies including Adobe Systems are offering at least six months.
Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, as well as GE itself, are among employers to announce an overhaul of performance review systems in the past year.
Ending annual raises hasn’t played much part in the conversation — yet. When GE considers something like that, ‘‘other companies will do it too,’’ said Ranjay Gulati, a professor at Harvard Business School.
‘‘People are looking for more flexibility, not more pay necessarily,’’ he said. ‘‘Relying on annual rhythms makes it artificial.’’
If America’s most-skilled employees can increasingly get special packages from their bosses, something like the opposite is happening at the bottom end of the labor market, where temporary or contracted-out jobs with limited benefits make up a growing share.
Less than a quarter of all companies in the US offer parents any paid time off, and only about 44 percent of workers qualify even for guaranteed unpaid leave.
The gap is fueling concern about rising inequality, and Democratic presidential candidates are backing efforts to enshrine longer parental and sick leave in law, rather than leaving it to the whims of employers.
Across the corporate world, few practices command such broad assent as the annual raise.
Only 1.2 percent of US companies use a discretionary timetable for increasing base pay, according to this year’s compensation survey by Mercer.
About 90 percent of companies have a fixed date when everyone receives their raise, assuming one is granted, while about 5 percent make the change for each employee on the anniversary of their hiring or move to their current job.
The idea of a fixed raise-day took root in the 1960s, said Steve Gross, a senior partner at Mercer. Now, with younger workers in particular staying with companies for shorter spells, a year may be too long to wait, Gross said.
The 124-year-old GE has long been a trend-setter. The review system championed by former Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch, in which the worst-performers were fired, spread widely.
Current CEO Jeffrey Immelt is seeking to simplify the company and streamline decision-making.
GE recently introduced a new method of performance review centered around a phone app called PD@GE that employees use to assess both subordinates and superiors. It aims to replace a once-a-year conversation with rolling feedback.