A part of collective salary increases in municipalities are shared according to local arrangement. Local agreement means that the municipal authority negotiates with the bargaining representatives to decide how the part allocated for local arrangement is divided among personnel. This thesis was a development task for the city of Kokkola and its purpose was to improve the course of wage negotiations conducted by the city of Kokkola. There has been a variety of different practices in conducting salary negotiation practices, and in most cases negotiations were held too late considering the predefined dates of salary increases. To ensure fluent salary negotiations, it was necessary to develop clear rules, procedures and scheduling. The aim of this thesis was to explore the current state of salary negotiation practices, look for issues that require development, and by making clear instructions and scheduling for wage negotiations enable a clear course of the negotiations for persons involved in them. The used research method was qualitative research. The idea of qualitative research is to under-stand, interpret, and create a descriptive model of the matter under research. Both action research and constructive research were used as approaches. Action research is used to help solve practical problems and to simultaneously bring up changes in people’s actions. Constructive research is used to create a new concrete product or plan. In the theoretical part of this thesis the nature of the salary negotiations and the course of events were studied in general, and these data then mirrored to the possible development needs of Kokkola city salary negotiation practices. The selected research methods were observation, individual and group interviews, and e-mail queries. The result of this thesis was a process map and an instruction booklet to guide the negotiators through the wage bargaining process. The instructions found in those materials include scheduling, different negotiation parties and their duties, definitions of the key concepts, and links to the pre-filled forms used in decision making. Scheduling problems were seen as the biggest problem in the wage bargaining process. By improving the scheduling of the negotiations, improvements are achieved both in the preparation of the negotiations, as well as in the post-measures. The follow-up action not included this thesis is the training of the personnel participating in the wage bargaining process. It was also found necessary, in addition to the already up-to-date job complexity assessment system, to update and start implementing assessment system used in determining the employees’ personal salary share more widely in the City of Kokkola.