Salary is touchy. It's tied up with shame on all sides: are we being underpaid? Did we overpay for someone that is unfair? Is it too late to fix it?!
Today, host Ross Kenyon monologues about the 2025 Salary Survey from the folks at CDRjobs (which you should go fill out right now!), and shares some lessons he learned about designing HR policies the hard way and from experienced colleagues.
The main lesson is: you're never designing a policy for just one case. That's just the first precedent that will determine how current and future employees try to make sense of a companys policies. Sometimes what can be fair for one can be unfair to many, and vice versa. Wisdom is knowing the difference, and wisdom unfortunately isn't neatly fit upon a bumper sticker.
Anyways, get ready for a thinking show with some anecdotes and a clear call to action!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Before we begin, I'd like to share a few words from our
sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics for
sponsoring reversing climate change.
You helped make this show possible.
I'm so grateful to you and you deserve it.
I don't like taking sponsorship from people whose companies I
just don't believe I don't want to work with.
And thankfully I don't have to because they're companies like
(00:22):
Arbonics are willing to come andsupport reversing climate
change. If you don't know about them,
they're doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic states in
Europe. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land. A lot of its abandoned or low
quality, not a lot is happening on it.
It used to be forced, but it wascleared for farming as farming
intensified. And then a lot of that farmland
(00:43):
was later abandoned as the global food system move towards
lower cost producers. The land just wasn't worth
tending, and certainly not tending in a way that we would
respect as regenerative and carbon sequestering process.
It was just underutilized, maybeunloved Bionics uses technology
to help land owners even find this land, and once they do have
(01:04):
it, how to restore it back into carbon removing biodiverse
forest. If you care about carbon being
removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested
continent that it once was, you should be looking at our
bionics. Go talk to them.
I had Lizette Lewick, their founder, on the podcast.
The link is in the show notes ifyou'd like to listen to it.
(01:25):
We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround
durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in.
It's a very thoughtful episode. I really like talking to her.
They made it really easy to pitch our bionics on doing some
business together because I wantto see their work be successful
restoring biodiversity and making forestry, especially good
forestry, profitable again. Man, that is a game changer and
(01:45):
so important if you can pull it off.
Thank you again, our bionics. The link to check out our
bionics website is in the show notes.
You should listen to the show ifyou haven't heard it already
that I do with Lizette. It will teach you quite a lot
about how they think and what they're doing.
And now we will feedback in to the rest of the show.
Thank you for listening. Here it Hey, thanks for
(02:12):
listening. I'm Ross Kenyon, I'm the host of
the Reversing climate Change podcast in a long time carbon
removal entrepreneur. Today is a monologue show and
it's a monologue in support of the 2025 Cdr salary survey put
out by the folks at Cdr Jobs. If you listen to this podcast, I
suspect there is a preponderancelikelihood that you have been on
Cdr jobs dot earth looking for positions.
(02:35):
It is the main place where carbon removal jobs are listed
and they use their position within our industry to get
access to data around HR mattersand most prominently around
compensation. Compensation is a topic that
obviously everyone cares about. Everyone would like more of it,
(02:56):
seemingly, if you asked them. That would be nice.
And the way that pay is distributed at companies opens
up a number of questions that ifyou are in the position of
starting your own company or in a position of leadership, you
will soon have to face. I'll get into all of that before
I do. If you work in carbon removal,
my ask to you is that you will please go and fill out the 2025
(03:18):
salary survey so that the folks at Cdr Jobs can get more access
to data around compensation so that they can put out analysis
that can make sure that people are being fairly compensated and
that more information is shared.We aim to be a transparent
industry, and this is one of those cases where more
information is certainly better to have.
The link is in the show notes. Pull it up right now while
(03:40):
you're listening. Take a look, fill it out, help
them get more data this year. And 2025 is of course, a very
important year for carbon removal for us to be moving and
developing. And this information will be
very valuable. So if you're listening, if you
could please do that. It's anonymous and it helps us
develop a clearer understanding of wage dynamics within carbon
(04:01):
removal. Today I'd like to share some
about why I care about this, andalso what it's like being at a
company that has to make decisions about HR matters,
human resources matters, and also about compensation.
Typically, if you haven't been in leadership or started a
company and there's some overlapbetween those categories, being
(04:24):
an employee, unless you are wildly empathetic to the
position of your company, your goal is to get as much for
yourself as possible, and presumably also your friends.
You'd like to see them well compensated, happy, feeling
wealthy, things of that nature. And it feels very unipolar in
(04:44):
that way when you are in leadership at a company.
The way that I usually put it iswhen you're a kid, you don't
really understand the reasons why authority figures do things.
Much of it feels arbitrary, capricious, unnecessary, and
there's a lot of that in there for sure.
(05:05):
It'd be hard for me to deny thatcapriciousness does not creep
into even petty authority figures when you were young.
I'm sure there's people you lookback on from your childhood and
and just know that something wasreally wrong with this person
and the way that they enacted authority over young people.
But I suspect there are also many cases where as you become
(05:27):
an adult, as you've been promoted at work, as you become
apparent that many of the rules have a logic to them that makes
sense, that may be invisible or illegible to those without this
experience. But as the experience becomes
acquired by you, the logic becomes apparent.
And anything at a company, once it grows beyond a couple
founders, there's a sort of casualistic logic to it, by
(05:51):
which I mean cases will be brought to you as the leadership
team, as a manager, as someone responsible for the company of
having to decide. And it's one of those things
where it can be. How should PTO be used?
Does that roll over year, over year?
Can people combine it? Can people save up a lot of it
(06:12):
and take two months in a row off?
That's just the first example that I even thought of.
The way to make a decision around an HR matter is not about
what is immediately fair to thisperson.
The tendency is to want to be extremely generous and almost
familial in these cases where you want to help this person
(06:34):
out, especially if you're a small company.
When you start, it feels like family and it feels wrong to
have very strict rules of employment policies.
But the correct way to make decisions for HR matters is to
know that whatever precedent youset will be cited in the future
(06:55):
against you in a number of caseswhen people bring matters to you
to decide. If you decide that people are
entitled to rack up as much PTO as as they want, and they can
use it in any manner that they choose, then you know 2 years
from now you will have someone who has months stacked up and
(07:16):
they're going to take it. And then also they're going to
take parental leave right after it and will effectively be gone
for a year or something like that.
And being so generous in this way, it's probably not fair to
the company to have to stack up that loss of experience all Co
located at the same time. And it's likely not fair to
(07:38):
their colleagues who have to make it work while this person
is gone. I've seen this go the other
direction too, where maybe a company started with a strong
ethos of colocation. Everyone is at the office
together or is mostly in the office.
Maybe it's two or three days where you're expected to be
there. And then someone who is deemed
too important to lose says that they need to move somewhere else
(08:03):
and that it's take it or leave it.
And the company could decide, well, we really need this person
for such and such reason, we can't let them go.
So we're going to allow this person to relocate and no longer
be Co located with the office. Guess what happens after that?
(08:25):
People notice it. They also face pressure to live
elsewhere. Maybe they need to move because
a parent is sick or something like that and they need to be
around to give more care. And so it's a very sympathetic
reason to offer this to them. But you just know that even if
in this specific case it is a generous interpretation of the
rules and kind of this person overall, it will feel unkind to
(08:48):
everyone else because you will be unable to offer them
something similar without a great reason.
And it feels bad. There are so many versions of
this too. I'm sure you can dream up some
scenarios, and I'm sure you've seen many of them where you felt
like a decision went the wrong direction, went and was either
too understanding or too inflexible.
(09:09):
And it likely depends upon whereyou're standing in relation to
the decision because that cannot, you know, motivated
reasoning is real. And so always knowing yourself
and what's happening inside of you is very important.
But I've also seen some cases where the right line, especially
as pertains to compensation, we're relatively well handled.
(09:30):
And I'll give you an example here.
One of the things I really likedabout Nori's hiring policies
that I learned a lot from was that we hired based upon a
banded pay range that was public.
So we use software to determine at certain levels of experience
in certain roles within the Seattle market how much
(09:50):
compensation there was. And the reason for doing this
was that negotiation is the areathrough which much inequality
and compensation is enacted because the people who feel that
they have more options and are more willing to walk away,
they're willing to stick their neck out a little bit further
(10:11):
and they're willing to ask for it.
Whenever the the stats come out on this, it's always that women
and people of color tend to be less successful in that
negotiation moment for various reasons.
I have a close friend who grew up poor and works at a place
that has a almost like a seniority aspect to their pay in
(10:33):
the sense that every year, everythree years you are on track to
go up a level and that level andcomes with a 12% pay raise or or
something like that. But it's all predicated upon the
first salary that you take. So because my my friend felt
uncomfortable negotiating out the gate and was so grateful to
(10:54):
have a job at this company, he is just being left behind where
he has Co workers who earn a decent chunk, more like a non
negligible amount more for the same work.
And it's all because either he didn't have the experience or
(11:15):
comfort to negotiate in this kind of environment.
You can go back sociologically and say it's because he's a
person of color, he grew up poor, some combination of those
things. Obviously they're often linked
in the United States. It just seems unfair.
And one of the things that has felt unfair about compensation
is that people are often scared to talk about it.
(11:39):
It's one of those things where if you go out to a happy hour
and you're hanging with with people and they all work at a
company and they might start talking about how much they
bring home. I think it's likely to lead to
bad feelings from at least someone coming home that night
because someone negotiated a better deal for themselves for
the same amount of work. And it can often feel pretty
(12:02):
crummy because it doesn't necessarily depend as much upon
skill or experience. Sometimes it depends upon how
confident you are and how giftedof an order you are at the right
moment. And so one of the things that we
tried to do was to limit the ability for a negotiation to
influence pay. The downside of that is that we
(12:24):
often lost candidates who were used to advocating for
themselves and getting better deals.
So sometimes they would look at this and say, like, why would I?
Why would I just take the offer?I'm used to getting an offer and
then going back and forth 5 rounds until I get all the PTO
and all the salary and feel likeI maxed out my possibilities at
a company. And that wasn't what we wanted
(12:48):
to do. We decided that culturally it
was more fair to say what we thought that this job was worth
in the market in which we were operating and put it out there
that way. And I felt that that led to less
bruised feelings than otherwise.Maybe there was some
(13:08):
disappointment on the front end that one couldn't talk oneself
into a a a greater amount of pay.
But the hope was that over time,culturally, this would create
more trusts that some people were not being paid less.
Or at least that there was a empirical justification for the
amount that could be pointed to such that it was algorithmic.
(13:30):
It reduced the personal influence of the applicant for
the job and it reduced the influence of those that might be
able to, at another company, customize the package that would
be offered to the applicant oncethey were offered a position.
I am not sure that this is the correct way to go in all cases.
(13:52):
There are trade-offs with this. In fact, I even phrased this in
terms of trade-offs because we likely lost candidates on the
front end who were disappointed by the static pay bans and
receiving an offer without the possibility of negotiation.
Like anything in life, there aretrade-offs that must be
considered, and that is certainly one.
But I did respect that we were willing to work in a place where
(14:16):
if salary information was revealed to everyone who worked
at a company, because those stories do exist.
You know, someone sends out the the compensation spreadsheet and
someone gets their their mitts on it.
And then like, Oh my gosh, that person makes that amount.
I've seen the quality of their work.
There's no way they deserve that.
How did that happen? It was nice to know that the
(14:37):
risk of that was less than it probably is at other companies.
There's likely still gonna be some of that so long as humans
are, I don't know, status oriented, somewhat competitive
or fully competitive agents uponthe planet.
And there are certainly cases where someone might have skills
that were unrepresented within the type of pay banding,
(14:59):
algorithmic salary setting that we were doing that might find it
harder to be fairly compensated.There probably were cases where
that would happen. How could it not?
Because it's software have some goofs like that built in.
But I did like that it was one of those principles that was
conservative in a good way, where if challenged on it,
there's less room for flexibility.
(15:21):
But that lack of flexibility potentially makes it more fair.
If you've been in this process before, if you've been on a
leadership team that has responsibility for company
policies, I suspect you've already learned this lesson that
some degree of inflexibility solves its own problems.
Learning the lesson that a company is not a family.
(15:42):
It takes some time of learning and I feel I've had to learn
that one several times. But when I do coach companies,
that is something that I often have to point out, especially
the first time founders is to tolearn this lesson.
Because there are a number of cases where I could think of
several off the top of my head where I think I made my desire
(16:07):
to be more flexible, generous, familial in a way, end up being
potentially less kind than something a bit more formal, a
bit more distanced. That counterintuitively, that
one can only learn from experience is actually the kind
way to run a company. And for that reason, I think
initiatives like this are reallyimportant.
(16:29):
I think publishing accurate pay bans or even just salaries for
positions is really valuable. I think when I'm out applying
for positions and there's no salary listed, I just imagine
that it's going to be disappointing or I'm going to
invest time into doing a cover letter and making this happen
only to be low balled. I would feel bad if I worked at
a company that paid a woman lessthan a man for the same job, or
(16:52):
focused so heavily on oratoricalability and negotiation skill
that those more able to take a riskier route of negotiation
might end up with a better pay packet than someone else.
I think that kind of personal influence should be minimized.
(17:15):
I think in cases like this we should run companies that err on
the side of if this were to be revealed, how would we feel
about it? I've heard it called something
like the front page test or the mother test.
Like if your mom found out that this was the policy at your
company or that your comments ended up on the front page of
(17:35):
The New York Times, how would you feel about it?
And I think issues around compensation absolutely are like
this. It's one of those areas that
feels so secretive because there's some aspect of shame
tied up in it. We either let someone get us
over a barrel and we overpaid for someone's services, or we
(17:56):
underpaid someone that could have asked for more but was too
scared or unskilled to do. I think in those cases it makes
more sense to go towards revealing how this is working.
If you're listening and you're an employee, you also should
probably be talking to your colleagues about how much you
(18:18):
make. It's one of those cases where it
could potentially give you a better edge on negotiation when
you are up for a raise or even if you need to go fix it now
that you're being underpaid. Knowing what your colleagues
make and being transparent aboutthat I think is an important
thing. Or you might find out that one
of your colleagues, he was less successful as you at negotiating
for their pay packet is being underpaid by your estimate.
(18:42):
And maybe you're able to use your influence to help them.
If you're an employer or on leadership and you're listening,
I think this is a good chance toredesign your HR policies such
that they would feel fair if they were revealed.
You should plan that your employees are going to talk
(19:02):
about their pay at some point orthere's going to be a mistake
and that information will get out against your will.
And you want to be able to standbehind it and feel that it's
publicly justifiable. And I think leadership efforts
like this from Cdr jobs is important because it gets us to
talk about this topic around which there's a lot of shame and
secrecy. I don't think running companies
(19:25):
this way is in the long term interests of the people doing
it. I think there are better ways to
design human resource policies such that problems like this are
avoided. And also if you maybe went down
the wrong path through inexperience or some other
reason, it's also not too late to start fixing this.
I think it's good to be honest about these matters and to
(19:48):
design systems that would feel good if the whole company or
your industry knew about them. And pay is certainly one of
these areas. It's good for meritocracy, it's
good for inequality, it's good for creating cultures of trust
where people want to work and want to stay.
(20:08):
And for that reason, I think youshould go and fill out the 2025
Cdr jobs salary survey. It's LinkedIn, the show notes.
I really want to make sure they get even more than they got last
year. So there's a 2024 Cdr salary
report that you can go read. The link is also in the show
notes. You should.
There's a lot of great information in there, as always.
(20:30):
I wish I could come down with the general principle here.
I think being conservative tendsto be the more fairway to go
when designing policies that will set precedent for HR
purposes, but I'm sure you can think of some examples where the
general rule is actually less fair.
So like so many of these shows, wisdom comes from the experience
(20:53):
of applying these rules, probably incorrectly, and
learning from that experience. And the wisdom is in knowing
when to apply which version of the rule, when to be strict, and
when to be forgiving. And there's so much more to say
about it. It's a surprisingly fascinating
part of running a company. In any case, thank you for
(21:15):
listening. The links are in the show notes.
A great rating and review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcast that has a rating function would
be greatly appreciated. If you'd like to be a
subscriber, it's $5 a month. Get ad free listening except for
the sponsored ads that you can hear from groups like our bonus
at the beginning of this episode.
(21:35):
Bonus content included with the $5 a month.
And hey, just thanks so much forlistening.
I'm always sorry that I have to throw in the little like
commercial aspect of this, but it's important for keeping the
show going. I appreciate you.
I appreciate you. I'm really glad that people are
out there listening to this and spending time with me.
You have so many things that youcould be listening to and you're
(21:57):
choosing to spend it with me. And I do not take that for
granted. So thank you so much.
I hope you have a wonderful day and goodbye for now.
Before we begin, I'd like to share a few words from our
sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics for
sponsoring reversing climate change.
You helped make this show possible.
I'm so grateful to you and you deserve it.
I don't like taking sponsorship from people whose companies I
just don't believe I don't want to work with.
And thankfully I don't have to because they're companies like
(00:22):
Arbonics are willing to come andsupport reversing climate
change. If you don't know about them,
they're doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic states in
Europe. Europe has over 14,000,000
hectares of underused land. A lot of its abandoned or low
quality, not a lot is happening on it.
It used to be forced, but it wascleared for farming as farming
intensified. And then a lot of that farmland
(00:43):
was later abandoned as the global food system move towards
lower cost producers. The land just wasn't worth
tending, and certainly not tending in a way that we would
respect as regenerative and carbon sequestering process.
It was just underutilized, maybeunloved Bionics uses technology
to help land owners even find this land, and once they do have
(01:04):
it, how to restore it back into carbon removing biodiverse
forest. If you care about carbon being
removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested
continent that it once was, you should be looking at our
bionics. Go talk to them.
I had Lizette Lewick, their founder, on the podcast.
The link is in the show notes ifyou'd like to listen to it.
(01:25):
We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround
durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in.
It's a very thoughtful episode. I really like talking to her.
They made it really easy to pitch our bionics on doing some
business together because I wantto see their work be successful
restoring biodiversity and making forestry, especially good
forestry, profitable again. Man, that is a game changer and
(01:45):
so important if you can pull it off.
Thank you again, our bionics. The link to check out our
bionics website is in the show notes.
You should listen to the show ifyou haven't heard it already
that I do with Lizette. It will teach you quite a lot
about how they think and what they're doing.
And now we will feedback in to the rest of the show.
Thank you for listening. Here it Hey, thanks for
(02:12):
listening. I'm Ross Kenyon, I'm the host of
the Reversing climate Change podcast in a long time carbon
removal entrepreneur. Today is a monologue show and
it's a monologue in support of the 2025 Cdr salary survey put
out by the folks at Cdr Jobs. If you listen to this podcast, I
suspect there is a preponderancelikelihood that you have been on
Cdr jobs dot earth looking for positions.
(02:35):
It is the main place where carbon removal jobs are listed
and they use their position within our industry to get
access to data around HR mattersand most prominently around
compensation. Compensation is a topic that
obviously everyone cares about. Everyone would like more of it,
(02:56):
seemingly, if you asked them. That would be nice.
And the way that pay is distributed at companies opens
up a number of questions that ifyou are in the position of
starting your own company or in a position of leadership, you
will soon have to face. I'll get into all of that before
I do. If you work in carbon removal,
my ask to you is that you will please go and fill out the 2025
(03:18):
salary survey so that the folks at Cdr Jobs can get more access
to data around compensation so that they can put out analysis
that can make sure that people are being fairly compensated and
that more information is shared.We aim to be a transparent
industry, and this is one of those cases where more
information is certainly better to have.
The link is in the show notes. Pull it up right now while
(03:40):
you're listening. Take a look, fill it out, help
them get more data this year. And 2025 is of course, a very
important year for carbon removal for us to be moving and
developing. And this information will be
very valuable. So if you're listening, if you
could please do that. It's anonymous and it helps us
develop a clearer understanding of wage dynamics within carbon
(04:01):
removal. Today I'd like to share some
about why I care about this, andalso what it's like being at a
company that has to make decisions about HR matters,
human resources matters, and also about compensation.
Typically, if you haven't been in leadership or started a
company and there's some overlapbetween those categories, being
(04:24):
an employee, unless you are wildly empathetic to the
position of your company, your goal is to get as much for
yourself as possible, and presumably also your friends.
You'd like to see them well compensated, happy, feeling
wealthy, things of that nature. And it feels very unipolar in
(04:44):
that way when you are in leadership at a company.
The way that I usually put it iswhen you're a kid, you don't
really understand the reasons why authority figures do things.
Much of it feels arbitrary, capricious, unnecessary, and
there's a lot of that in there for sure.
(05:05):
It'd be hard for me to deny thatcapriciousness does not creep
into even petty authority figures when you were young.
I'm sure there's people you lookback on from your childhood and
and just know that something wasreally wrong with this person
and the way that they enacted authority over young people.
But I suspect there are also many cases where as you become
(05:27):
an adult, as you've been promoted at work, as you become
apparent that many of the rules have a logic to them that makes
sense, that may be invisible or illegible to those without this
experience. But as the experience becomes
acquired by you, the logic becomes apparent.
And anything at a company, once it grows beyond a couple
founders, there's a sort of casualistic logic to it, by
(05:51):
which I mean cases will be brought to you as the leadership
team, as a manager, as someone responsible for the company of
having to decide. And it's one of those things
where it can be. How should PTO be used?
Does that roll over year, over year?
Can people combine it? Can people save up a lot of it
(06:12):
and take two months in a row off?
That's just the first example that I even thought of.
The way to make a decision around an HR matter is not about
what is immediately fair to thisperson.
The tendency is to want to be extremely generous and almost
familial in these cases where you want to help this person
(06:34):
out, especially if you're a small company.
When you start, it feels like family and it feels wrong to
have very strict rules of employment policies.
But the correct way to make decisions for HR matters is to
know that whatever precedent youset will be cited in the future
(06:55):
against you in a number of caseswhen people bring matters to you
to decide. If you decide that people are
entitled to rack up as much PTO as as they want, and they can
use it in any manner that they choose, then you know 2 years
from now you will have someone who has months stacked up and
(07:16):
they're going to take it. And then also they're going to
take parental leave right after it and will effectively be gone
for a year or something like that.
And being so generous in this way, it's probably not fair to
the company to have to stack up that loss of experience all Co
located at the same time. And it's likely not fair to
(07:38):
their colleagues who have to make it work while this person
is gone. I've seen this go the other
direction too, where maybe a company started with a strong
ethos of colocation. Everyone is at the office
together or is mostly in the office.
Maybe it's two or three days where you're expected to be
there. And then someone who is deemed
too important to lose says that they need to move somewhere else
(08:03):
and that it's take it or leave it.
And the company could decide, well, we really need this person
for such and such reason, we can't let them go.
So we're going to allow this person to relocate and no longer
be Co located with the office. Guess what happens after that?
(08:25):
People notice it. They also face pressure to live
elsewhere. Maybe they need to move because
a parent is sick or something like that and they need to be
around to give more care. And so it's a very sympathetic
reason to offer this to them. But you just know that even if
in this specific case it is a generous interpretation of the
rules and kind of this person overall, it will feel unkind to
(08:48):
everyone else because you will be unable to offer them
something similar without a great reason.
And it feels bad. There are so many versions of
this too. I'm sure you can dream up some
scenarios, and I'm sure you've seen many of them where you felt
like a decision went the wrong direction, went and was either
too understanding or too inflexible.
(09:09):
And it likely depends upon whereyou're standing in relation to
the decision because that cannot, you know, motivated
reasoning is real. And so always knowing yourself
and what's happening inside of you is very important.
But I've also seen some cases where the right line, especially
as pertains to compensation, we're relatively well handled.
(09:30):
And I'll give you an example here.
One of the things I really likedabout Nori's hiring policies
that I learned a lot from was that we hired based upon a
banded pay range that was public.
So we use software to determine at certain levels of experience
in certain roles within the Seattle market how much
(09:50):
compensation there was. And the reason for doing this
was that negotiation is the areathrough which much inequality
and compensation is enacted because the people who feel that
they have more options and are more willing to walk away,
they're willing to stick their neck out a little bit further
(10:11):
and they're willing to ask for it.
Whenever the the stats come out on this, it's always that women
and people of color tend to be less successful in that
negotiation moment for various reasons.
I have a close friend who grew up poor and works at a place
that has a almost like a seniority aspect to their pay in
(10:33):
the sense that every year, everythree years you are on track to
go up a level and that level andcomes with a 12% pay raise or or
something like that. But it's all predicated upon the
first salary that you take. So because my my friend felt
uncomfortable negotiating out the gate and was so grateful to
(10:54):
have a job at this company, he is just being left behind where
he has Co workers who earn a decent chunk, more like a non
negligible amount more for the same work.
And it's all because either he didn't have the experience or
(11:15):
comfort to negotiate in this kind of environment.
You can go back sociologically and say it's because he's a
person of color, he grew up poor, some combination of those
things. Obviously they're often linked
in the United States. It just seems unfair.
And one of the things that has felt unfair about compensation
is that people are often scared to talk about it.
(11:39):
It's one of those things where if you go out to a happy hour
and you're hanging with with people and they all work at a
company and they might start talking about how much they
bring home. I think it's likely to lead to
bad feelings from at least someone coming home that night
because someone negotiated a better deal for themselves for
the same amount of work. And it can often feel pretty
(12:02):
crummy because it doesn't necessarily depend as much upon
skill or experience. Sometimes it depends upon how
confident you are and how giftedof an order you are at the right
moment. And so one of the things that we
tried to do was to limit the ability for a negotiation to
influence pay. The downside of that is that we
(12:24):
often lost candidates who were used to advocating for
themselves and getting better deals.
So sometimes they would look at this and say, like, why would I?
Why would I just take the offer?I'm used to getting an offer and
then going back and forth 5 rounds until I get all the PTO
and all the salary and feel likeI maxed out my possibilities at
a company. And that wasn't what we wanted
(12:48):
to do. We decided that culturally it
was more fair to say what we thought that this job was worth
in the market in which we were operating and put it out there
that way. And I felt that that led to less
bruised feelings than otherwise.Maybe there was some
(13:08):
disappointment on the front end that one couldn't talk oneself
into a a a greater amount of pay.
But the hope was that over time,culturally, this would create
more trusts that some people were not being paid less.
Or at least that there was a empirical justification for the
amount that could be pointed to such that it was algorithmic.
(13:30):
It reduced the personal influence of the applicant for
the job and it reduced the influence of those that might be
able to, at another company, customize the package that would
be offered to the applicant oncethey were offered a position.
I am not sure that this is the correct way to go in all cases.
(13:52):
There are trade-offs with this. In fact, I even phrased this in
terms of trade-offs because we likely lost candidates on the
front end who were disappointed by the static pay bans and
receiving an offer without the possibility of negotiation.
Like anything in life, there aretrade-offs that must be
considered, and that is certainly one.
But I did respect that we were willing to work in a place where
(14:16):
if salary information was revealed to everyone who worked
at a company, because those stories do exist.
You know, someone sends out the the compensation spreadsheet and
someone gets their their mitts on it.
And then like, Oh my gosh, that person makes that amount.
I've seen the quality of their work.
There's no way they deserve that.
How did that happen? It was nice to know that the
(14:37):
risk of that was less than it probably is at other companies.
There's likely still gonna be some of that so long as humans
are, I don't know, status oriented, somewhat competitive
or fully competitive agents uponthe planet.
And there are certainly cases where someone might have skills
that were unrepresented within the type of pay banding,
(14:59):
algorithmic salary setting that we were doing that might find it
harder to be fairly compensated.There probably were cases where
that would happen. How could it not?
Because it's software have some goofs like that built in.
But I did like that it was one of those principles that was
conservative in a good way, where if challenged on it,
there's less room for flexibility.
(15:21):
But that lack of flexibility potentially makes it more fair.
If you've been in this process before, if you've been on a
leadership team that has responsibility for company
policies, I suspect you've already learned this lesson that
some degree of inflexibility solves its own problems.
Learning the lesson that a company is not a family.
(15:42):
It takes some time of learning and I feel I've had to learn
that one several times. But when I do coach companies,
that is something that I often have to point out, especially
the first time founders is to tolearn this lesson.
Because there are a number of cases where I could think of
several off the top of my head where I think I made my desire
(16:07):
to be more flexible, generous, familial in a way, end up being
potentially less kind than something a bit more formal, a
bit more distanced. That counterintuitively, that
one can only learn from experience is actually the kind
way to run a company. And for that reason, I think
initiatives like this are reallyimportant.
(16:29):
I think publishing accurate pay bans or even just salaries for
positions is really valuable. I think when I'm out applying
for positions and there's no salary listed, I just imagine
that it's going to be disappointing or I'm going to
invest time into doing a cover letter and making this happen
only to be low balled. I would feel bad if I worked at
a company that paid a woman lessthan a man for the same job, or
(16:52):
focused so heavily on oratoricalability and negotiation skill
that those more able to take a riskier route of negotiation
might end up with a better pay packet than someone else.
I think that kind of personal influence should be minimized.
(17:15):
I think in cases like this we should run companies that err on
the side of if this were to be revealed, how would we feel
about it? I've heard it called something
like the front page test or the mother test.
Like if your mom found out that this was the policy at your
company or that your comments ended up on the front page of
(17:35):
The New York Times, how would you feel about it?
And I think issues around compensation absolutely are like
this. It's one of those areas that
feels so secretive because there's some aspect of shame
tied up in it. We either let someone get us
over a barrel and we overpaid for someone's services, or we
(17:56):
underpaid someone that could have asked for more but was too
scared or unskilled to do. I think in those cases it makes
more sense to go towards revealing how this is working.
If you're listening and you're an employee, you also should
probably be talking to your colleagues about how much you
(18:18):
make. It's one of those cases where it
could potentially give you a better edge on negotiation when
you are up for a raise or even if you need to go fix it now
that you're being underpaid. Knowing what your colleagues
make and being transparent aboutthat I think is an important
thing. Or you might find out that one
of your colleagues, he was less successful as you at negotiating
for their pay packet is being underpaid by your estimate.
(18:42):
And maybe you're able to use your influence to help them.
If you're an employer or on leadership and you're listening,
I think this is a good chance toredesign your HR policies such
that they would feel fair if they were revealed.
You should plan that your employees are going to talk
(19:02):
about their pay at some point orthere's going to be a mistake
and that information will get out against your will.
And you want to be able to standbehind it and feel that it's
publicly justifiable. And I think leadership efforts
like this from Cdr jobs is important because it gets us to
talk about this topic around which there's a lot of shame and
secrecy. I don't think running companies
(19:25):
this way is in the long term interests of the people doing
it. I think there are better ways to
design human resource policies such that problems like this are
avoided. And also if you maybe went down
the wrong path through inexperience or some other
reason, it's also not too late to start fixing this.
I think it's good to be honest about these matters and to
(19:48):
design systems that would feel good if the whole company or
your industry knew about them. And pay is certainly one of
these areas. It's good for meritocracy, it's
good for inequality, it's good for creating cultures of trust
where people want to work and want to stay.
(20:08):
And for that reason, I think youshould go and fill out the 2025
Cdr jobs salary survey. It's LinkedIn, the show notes.
I really want to make sure they get even more than they got last
year. So there's a 2024 Cdr salary
report that you can go read. The link is also in the show
notes. You should.
There's a lot of great information in there, as always.
(20:30):
I wish I could come down with the general principle here.
I think being conservative tendsto be the more fairway to go
when designing policies that will set precedent for HR
purposes, but I'm sure you can think of some examples where the
general rule is actually less fair.
So like so many of these shows, wisdom comes from the experience
(20:53):
of applying these rules, probably incorrectly, and
learning from that experience. And the wisdom is in knowing
when to apply which version of the rule, when to be strict, and
when to be forgiving. And there's so much more to say
about it. It's a surprisingly fascinating
part of running a company. In any case, thank you for
(21:15):
listening. The links are in the show notes.
A great rating and review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to podcast that has a rating function would
be greatly appreciated. If you'd like to be a
subscriber, it's $5 a month. Get ad free listening except for
the sponsored ads that you can hear from groups like our bonus
at the beginning of this episode.
(21:35):
Bonus content included with the $5 a month.
And hey, just thanks so much forlistening.
I'm always sorry that I have to throw in the little like
commercial aspect of this, but it's important for keeping the
show going. I appreciate you.
I appreciate you. I'm really glad that people are
out there listening to this and spending time with me.
You have so many things that youcould be listening to and you're
(21:57):
choosing to spend it with me. And I do not take that for
granted. So thank you so much.
I hope you have a wonderful day and goodbye for now.
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