207 - TZL - Burke Pemberton

just this idea of, it's a lot easier to have a conversation with two people that work in the same group and theoretically, may have similar titles and how you articulate why somebody might be paid a little bit more than what you're paid when you institute or incorporate the idea of fairness into the conversation. Because a lot of times we want to just reduce it down just to the number. Well, why is he making 5,000 more than I make and we do the same job. It's like, okay, well, let me articulate what this person does on a regular basis. It's not so much the value that they bring to the table that you don't bring, it's just fair for us to pay this individual X amount because of these things that they're able to accomplish on a regular basis. And it's not to say that that individual that you're talking to can't achieve those as well but it creates an easier platform for you to operate from when having those conversations, because they can be difficult conversations. But once you start instituting fairness into the conversation, and articulating across the spectrum of an organization, why people make what they make, then it's a much different conversation than just reducing it to ones and zeros and saying, Bob makes the X and Sally make X and that's just why it is because that doesn't always compute for people. Burke Pemberton [33:18] That's right. It's always a challenging conversation compensation. It's never an easy conversation but if you can point to some sort of guideposts and make sure you're putting all the expectations out there ahead of time so that there are no moving goalposts and try and make sure that the data is visible for people to see their progress and how they're doing. All that stuff is really important. And that doesn't mean that we don't get into the situation or nuance of the salary conversations. That's one of the things that we set out to get rid of. There's a method and a reason and rationale behind transparent salaries and the process behind it. And that's because historically marginalized workers have not felt as comfortable negotiating what would be considered a fair salary. And so we wanted to take the negotiation out of the process, and we do. We make salary decisions, and then we send people a letter and say, here's your updated compensation for the year a and if you want to sit down and talk about it, let's do that and so you'll know what to do next time. And so we get folks engaged in the process, but it's not a discussion because people aren't going to stand up for themselves necessarily and ask for what they deserve and so we need to put a little bit more thought into making sure that people are being compensated equitably. And we have a whole committee dedicated to that, we call it our membership and compensation task force. And we've got members of every team in our finance in our HR groups to sit on there, and anybody can sit on this group and we make all the decisions about compensation, profit distributions, the pathway to ownership, benefits are just in the culture of HR group itself. But as far as the more monetary types of compensation, anybody can sit in that group and anybody can put forward a proposal. And so the

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