Re:Our Open and Autonomous Salary System
by shostack on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @12:15PM
(#11621934)
How did you factor in market data on what current market rates were, and what was your source for that data? Was that source data also available and agreed upon by your employees?
If market rate changes for certain roles more than say, a fixed percentage every year, you can run into the trap of people falling behind market rate. Without some mechanism to correct for that, people increasingly feel they need to leave in order to get compensated fairly.
Taking a step back, I commend this effort. I have faced endless stress because of totally opaque salary situations in the past, and often thought it would alleviate the pain and save a ton of time for both parties if companies were just more open about these things. No system is perfect, but there's a lot to learn from trying this.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that many people did not sign-up for a company with this system and may prefer the old system. They are now forced into what becomes a very social and political situation where they may not be super social themselves, and may have strong desires to avoid politics like the plague (I know I sure hate office politics). If my livelihood suddenly depended on that MUCH more than it used to, I might no longer enjoy working at such a place, even if I felt I was compensated at a fair rate because the amount of constant stress from the process would be a huge increase and detract my focus from my actual work.
Personally, I think a happy medium between the two worlds is agreeing upon solid, tangible goals for employees with a clear picture of how that impacts comp, as well as a neutral 3rd party salary data provider whose process and data are available for employees to review to ensure it isn't favoring the company (since that is who pays them).
In fact, if anyone has strong recommendations for any such data providers I'd love to hear them--Glassdoor is a helpful starting point, but their data is often lacking.
If market rate changes for certain roles more than say, a fixed percentage every year, you can run into the trap of people falling behind market rate. Without some mechanism to correct for that, people increasingly feel they need to leave in order to get compensated fairly.
Taking a step back, I commend this effort. I have faced endless stress because of totally opaque salary situations in the past, and often thought it would alleviate the pain and save a ton of time for both parties if companies were just more open about these things. No system is perfect, but there's a lot to learn from trying this.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is that many people did not sign-up for a company with this system and may prefer the old system. They are now forced into what becomes a very social and political situation where they may not be super social themselves, and may have strong desires to avoid politics like the plague (I know I sure hate office politics). If my livelihood suddenly depended on that MUCH more than it used to, I might no longer enjoy working at such a place, even if I felt I was compensated at a fair rate because the amount of constant stress from the process would be a huge increase and detract my focus from my actual work.
Personally, I think a happy medium between the two worlds is agreeing upon solid, tangible goals for employees with a clear picture of how that impacts comp, as well as a neutral 3rd party salary data provider whose process and data are available for employees to review to ensure it isn't favoring the company (since that is who pays them).
In fact, if anyone has strong recommendations for any such data providers I'd love to hear them--Glassdoor is a helpful starting point, but their data is often lacking.