Transparent salaries, Scaling Up Compensation, Hiring Gen Z on their terms & The five things to help you declutter and lick your toads
“If the vigilance was dropped, even for a moment, then the weight of the battle would shift. We are forced to keep running merely to keep still.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee
Great quote! Often the world can feel a little as though we need to keep running merely to keep still. But as Ryan Holiday puts it in Stillness is the key, “Stillness is to be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess equanimity exterior and interior on command”.
So what if we reversed the phrase above and considered how it might apply to your life?
We should force ourselves to keep still, so we can then keep running. Then the weight of the battle would shift, and we could drop our vigilance.”
Let’s talk about people.
The case for transparent salaries
When Jen Leech, Co-founder at Truss presented to their 18 employee team that the research they’d been doing into pay inequality in their industry was inconclusive, employees overwhelmingly wanted to implement pay transparency. Says Leech, “Regardless of whether we were able to prove there were problems with pay fairness, there was a perception that it might not be fair if it wasn’t transparent.”
During her research, Leech investigated a company called Buffer, which published not only their team salaries publicly, but also the equations on how they calculate the compensation. The spreadsheet on the previous link is a fantastic tool for entrepreneurs and managers considering how they calculate everything from salary, equity, seniority, and location to determine their compensation transparently. Why did Buffer initially do this? To align with their Core Value of “Default to Transparency.”
Back to Jen at Truss, and after a year, she explains the rollout.
“We published salaries, levels, and names in a simple spreadsheet made internally visible to the entire company.
We waited to see what disaster would ensue. And… there wasn’t one. After all the work that went into laying the groundwork for salary transparency, we discovered that there weren’t any surprises left. We had shared our market-rate research, levelling document, and salary rollout plan as we worked. When the rollout finally happened, the reaction was, “oh, sure, that makes sense.”
Read Jen’s story of making salaries transparent here How we made salaries transparent
Scaling Up Compensation
I’ve recently been reading the new book by Verne Harnish and Sebastian Ross, with whom I shared the EMP Boston learning journey a decade ago. I’ve enjoyed it, and I feel it’s got some great ideas to consider for your team’s compensation.
Here’s the synopsis.
“How you compensate people is one of the most important strategic decisions fast-growing companies will make — but few get it right. Do any of these challenges sound familiar?
“I gave a star performer a raise, and now everyone else is marching into my office, demanding one, too.” “If anyone looked closely at our payroll, it would be hard to rationalize why we’re paying certain people what we do.” “I’m tired of losing our best people to the Googles of the world because we can’t match their salaries.”
Compensation is one of your largest expenses. You must turn it into a strategic advantage in attracting, retaining, and motivating talent (or not accidentally demotivating them). This book details 5 principles for designing effective compensation systems along with plenty of practical examples from leading small, medium, and large firms.”
The five principles from the book are
- Be different aligning compensation with culture and strategy
- Fairness not sameness creating a coherent inflexible pay structure
- Easy on the carrots using individual incentives effectively
- Gamify games driving critical numbers through p(l)ay
- Sharing is caring getting employees to think like owners
It’s currently only available in e-book (Kindle), and here’s the link Scaling Up Compensation: 5 Design Principles for Turning Your Largest Expense into a Strategic Advantage
Hiring Gen Z on their terms
Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2010, will make up 30% of the workforce in eight years. And for junior roles, which are increasingly difficult to hire for, understanding how they communicate and intuitively interact can be an advantage in the hiring market.
Here are two interesting statistics I came across this week;
- Nearly 7 in 10 Gen Z job seekers believe that they do not need to meet in person to forge a meaningful professional connection.
- 87% of Gen Z job seekers believe that messaging with an employer may lead to a job.
So it rather than your traditional online advert, email application, then interview, another way to hire juniors might be a text message conversation with them.
Read the article here Gen Z job seekers are finding careers and building work relationships in a whole new way
Quick clips
With Work From Home now an established benefit for many employees, here are 10 Things Your Commute Does to Your Body.
These two economists proved that raising the minimum wage will cause employment to rise. In doing so, they simultaneously angered the establishment and won a Nobel prize.
This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast
This week we’re talking about all the small non-strategic things that weigh you down and create mental clutter.
If you aren’t able to eliminate all these issues you can’t do the best work possible and be clear in your thinking.
We discuss the rule of 5 D’s — the five things to help you declutter and lick your toads.
Eliminate your emotionally taxing issues — lick your toads
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
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