Monday, December 22, 2014

The Salary Dilemma

The last couple of months my colleagues and I have been evaluating different alternatives for „Personalverantwortung“ (I’ve asked several native English speakers and it seems like there is no appropriate translation, so I will use the German term).
We’ve talked about what exactly we mean by referring to Personalverantwortung at Jimdo and we came up with seven different elements. One of these elements is, obviously, remuneration. People want to get salaries, and there needs to be some kind of mechanism in place to decide upon the salary level. The „traditional“ mechanism for doing this is some kind of line manager who does (mostly annual) performance reviews with individual salary negotiations. Perhaps that’s the best (or the least bad) solution in many contexts, but as I mentioned, we wanted to evaluate other options. So what we did was 1) read different articles on this topic (eg [1],[2],[3]), 2) talk to a lot of our teams about this topic. The conversations were very insightful in many different respects. What I found most interesting was a thought that was expressed in almost every conversation. It goes like this:

„The person/group who decides on my salary need to be very close to me, so that they can evaluate the quality of my work. At the same time this person/group cannot be on my team, because my behaviour towards this person/group will be different as soon as he/she sets my salary. Oh wait a minute...“

This is what I call the salary dilemma: Whoever decides on the salary of a person needs to be close and not close to this person at the same time.

A line manager has to deal with exactly this problem: He/she is supposed to evaluate people. In most cases he/she is either very close to the team and therefore might cause disfunctional behavior (eg people not asking for help when their annual review is close) or he/she is far enough from the team to avoid this kind of disfunction. But then the remuneration will most likely become very similar to roulette („Haven’t heard anything bad about you. What about a 3% raise?“) Both options don’t look very promising. I am not saying that it’s impossible to find a good balance, and I have seen very good managers doing a great job in creating a high-trust environment with their teams. But I believe it’s very challenging.
Of course we can replace the line manager with a different person or some kind of committee, eg a peer group. This might be better in some respect, but the dilemma stays in place.

I am aware that there are many very different models for renumeration like self-selected salaries, uniform salaries, salary formulas etc. And we’ve been thinking about ways to avoid or minimize the effects of the salary dilemma. At this point we are close to run a couple of experiments to learn more about not only remuneration, but the whole topic of Personalverantwortung. I might blog about this (and all the other insighst I’ve had so far) later.

But for now I am asking for your input:

How do you deal with the salary dilemma?

Please leave a comment or send me an email to arne[døt]roock[ät]jimdo[døt]com


P.S. I would like to thank all the smart people with whom I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this topic: Not only my great colleagues from Jimdo, but also Russell Healy, Simon Marcus, and Jim Benson. You guys rock!

References
[3] How salaries, career progression and reviews work in a #NoManager company


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Like this post? Then you should check out my previous post Stop bashing managers! and one of my newer posts Radical Transparency?

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