The fourth part in my series on being a Startup CTO.
I’m a big fan of transparency within my teams. I believe that it shows trust and enables people to make smarter decisions as they have more context to make them.
For me, one of the pinnacles of trust and transparency is enabling people to see the salaries of their co-workers (including their managers).
There are a lot of great posts out there that describe various transparent salary systems. I haven’t seen many that describe the journey to getting these systems rolled out with minimal problems. What follows is how I rolled out a transparent salary scheme in the engineering team at Conversocial.
I had been considering making engineering salaries transparent for some time and kept finding reasons not to do it - being busy, other bigger problems to solve, the usual startup stuff. It all came to a head when one of the engineers, Ed, came to me and said: “I have no evidence for this, but, I feel that I’m underpaid relative to everyone else”. This statement shocked me as I knew that he was one of the best-paid engineers. I wanted to understand why he felt like this, and I asked Ed to draw up a list of everyone else and what he thought their salaries were compared to his in £5k increments.
What he produced was, in hindsight, obvious. Ed was a frugal guy. He didn’t buy fancy clothes, didn’t eat fancy dinners and cycled to work every day. The engineers Ed felt were earning more than him were the ones that lived a more lavish lifestyle. In one case, someone he felt was earning £20k more than him was earning £20k less. The person he was comparing himself to was an accomplished photographer and loved going out to fancy restaurants and taking beautiful photos of the food.
Ed was the final push I needed to move transparent salaries to the top of my list of projects.
Before jumping in at the deep end, I spent some time talking this over with our CEO. We discussed the pros and cons of going transparent. We were both generally keen to be as transparent as we could with the team, and this felt like a natural next progression. There were some initial concerns:
We came up with plans for all of these. Most of it was solved by trying to pay fairly and competitively. If we’re struggling to retain or recruit someone then either we’re not competitive (and we need to increase our salaries across the board), or we have to stick to our plan as paying one person the ‘wrong’ amount would cause upset across the rest of the team. This latter point is valid even without a transparent system as people talk about salaries and guess at what other people earn.
The conversation with our CFO was very similar to the one with the CEO. Except the CFO wasn’t as motivated by transparency. The CFO was much more concerned with predictability of our engineering budgets and ensuring we were smart with our money. I informed our CFO that the likely outcome of this process was an initial jump in salaries as we level everyone out and a switch to reviewing salaries every 6 months to ensure we’re always competitive.
The initial increase was less of a problem than I imagined. Our CFO understood that the market for engineers was getting more competitive and being able to retain them was important (it helped that I had identified a few engineers as potential flight risks as they had improved significantly and were overdue a raise).
The switch to reviewing salaries every 6 months was probably the biggest hurdle. We eventually agreed that at the start of each year we’d agree a budget for increases for the whole year and I could phase those increases in however I liked. If I then wanted to go beyond those increases we would have to talk to the board and get the budgets changed.
After getting buy-in from our CEO and CFO, I then took the idea to the team at one of our team meetings. I made it clear that I hadn’t yet created a system, but, I wanted to understand how they felt about the idea of creating a more thorough system of setting salaries and that the system would be transparent.
The resounding answer was “this sounds good if you get it right, but, you probably won’t”.
None of the engineers had ever worked in an environment with transparent salary schemes. All of the engineers were used to a system where they asked and campaigned for their pay rises and had no idea if it was fair compared to the other members of the team.
I had must have caught the interest of some of the engineers as I started getting linked to various posts from other companies about how they set up their scheme. Often the engineers would tell me what was good or bad about the schemes.
I’m going to skip a detailed discussion of the system itself as it is described in a previous post. It is sufficient to say that the system comprised of an evaluation of approximately 20 different skills and the person’s strength at that skill with 4 different grades of strength for any skill.
After devising the rough framework, I sat down and evaluated all the team leads skills and then had them do the same for their engineers. This evaluation allowed me to start spotting patterns and use these patterns to form the various grade boundaries. E.g. an engineer must have most skills demonstrated at a level of ‘self sufficient’ to progress to mid-level.
The calibration process highlighted a few discrepancies. Some people were being paid less than they should. Some people were being paid more than they should be.
For the people that were being paid less, they got a pay rise in advance of the system being made visible to everyone.
For the people that were being paid more I had to come up with a justification. I found a solution in the concept of an “uplift”. The engineers that were being paid more than they should be were being paid these rates for historical reasons with regards to specific skills being hard to find - e.g. javascript engineers that can build complex web applications were scarce at one point. We then created an uplift for these skills and said anyone that demonstrates they can do this will also receive the uplift and as the skill becomes less scarce the uplift will decrease. At the time of my departure from Conversocial all of the uplifts had been removed as people progressed and learnt rarer skills.
For the actual rollout of the scheme, I sat down with each person individually, explained their new grade and why they were at that grade. I explained the system to them and what their salary would be. I then took the time to answer any questions from the engineer.
After this, I then herded everyone into a room and put the spreadsheet of salaries on the wall for everyone to review. I was nervous that despite me being comfortable with the numbers someone would be upset. I planned that if anyone was upset I would attempt to understand why and resolve to fix any unforeseen issues.
What happened? Nothing. It was one of the biggest anti-climaxes I have ever experienced. Everyone looked at it. Everyone saw that they were in the right place and surrounded by people that they felt were peers. Everyone understood the system and its fairness. Everyone was happy.
After going transparent, I had a few interesting things happen.
Shortly after implementing a transparent salary scheme at Conversocial I got approached by one of our engineers, Jess. Jess had received an offer from her previous company to come back to them. The salary was approximately 25% more than the salary we were paying. This salary was a huge increase and representative not just of how good Jess is, but, also of specific knowledge that Jess had of the previous company and the specific value she had to them.
Jess explained this offer to me and then instantly said: “I know you can’t change my salary due to the salary scheme, but, I wanted to talk to you about my future here”. Straight away, money was off the table. We then had a productive conversation about how Jess wanted to lead a team and get real experience with leading more junior engineers. I hadn’t realised how strongly Jess wanted to lead a team. I explained to Jess that although there weren’t any opportunities at that specific point in time, the company was growing, my target was to hire another 5 engineers and build another team in the near future and that she’d definitely be up for consideration for a leadership role when the role became available. I was also honest with her. I explained to Jess that I couldn’t promise this role to her even though I felt that she would be great for it. I wanted her to understand that I wouldn’t make a promise I couldn’t 100% keep. I told her that the opportunity she had at her previous company was an excellent salary and not likely to be matched elsewhere. This was a conversation where I laid out facts, was transparent about my goals and my views of her and the company.
Having transparency and honesty in our history meant that Jess trusted me that we’d consider her when the time came. Jess decided to stay with us as she understood the potential for growth with Conversocial was worth more to her than a 25% increase in salary.
Roughly nine months later an opportunity arose, and Jess was made a team lead. Eighteen months further on, Jess was still with Conversocial and a very successful team lead.
I believe that had we not had a strict and transparent salary scheme this conversation would have played out very differently. We would have likely got hung up on the salary and not spent enough time focussing on what Jess really wanted long term. Jess would have likely left for the pay rise.
Critics of these systems argue that I could have just said Jess’s salary was not negotiable until pay review time and still had a productive conversation with her about her career goals. This is partly true. However, Jess would not have known whether I was simply saying that her pay was not negotiable or that it was true. Jess would also have not known whether her pay rise was fair and the rest of the team might eventually have found out. Transparent systems make it obvious to her what the situation is.
Finally, an accomplished negotiator would argue that I could have discussed salary and discussed her future and came to the same end. I would argue that salary is such an emotive subject that once it is on the table it is hard to get away from it.
We had a bright young engineer who pushed the salary system at Conversocial. Fred was keen to work his way up the grades at Conversocial.
Every time we did a skills evaluation with Fred would argue that he had demonstrated skill X to the level required and would provide evidence of it. Every time Fred would ask for clarifications about what skill Y on the next grade meant and what he had to do. This was a great conversation to be having. Fred was hungry and was pushing us to help him grow as fast as possible.
As a direct result of this, Fred has grown his skills at an astounding rate, and his grade has improved rapidly in line with this.
Rolling out a transparent salary system need not be hard. Talk to your CEO and your CFO to get their buy-in. Talk to the team to ensure they’re happy with this level of transparency. Take the time to carefully calibrate the system and if all goes well you’ll be greeted with a contented quietness when everyone finds out what their salaries are in relation to everyone else.