How companies manage the salary system seems to be a discussion topic everywhere. There are several ways to do it, but they all seem to have notorious pros and cons.
Before we start talking about our experience with salaries, you need to understand how we work.
We are a small company were bosses don’t exists. This means that there is no hierarchy, just horizontal organization. We take advantage of this and we try to include everyone in the main decisions, and encouraging all of our team members to discuss the topics that need to be discussed.
Every person in Cavepot has access to all the information, like bills, salaries, goals, and projects. This methodology is used for everything, specially when we have to decide in what kind of projects we will take and so on.
We strongly believe on transparency and trust. This are the most important values on our company.
For example, Fridays for us are sacred!! We prepare a delicious breakfast each Friday and use this space to talk about anything that we think is important. We can talk about sports or any kind of small talk, but we also discuss subjects that impact not only the company but every person on it.
The most common topics are current new projects, new ideas or technologies that we want to learn, but we also we talk about us and our personal lives. This is an open and no- judgamental zone. We can bring up personal experiences, or situations we are going through that may impact our work flow. This approach motivate us and help us work better.
Now that you have a basic insight on how we see work, let’s talk to what we came to: salaries.
Lately we’ve been talking about salaries because we believed that our salaries were below the average, so of course we needed to do something about that.
We didn’t know what was the right approach, or even wore, we didn’t know if there was a “perfect” way to manage salaries. Therefore we decided carry out an experiment and see what happend.
We decided that each person in the company should think about the salary they deserved. We created a shared document to start working on that.
In my case I researched the market because I didn’t have a clear idea about standard salaries. Based on that, I decided to put a minimum and a maximum.
When everyone found a number, we scheduled a Friday to discuss it and see how Cavepot could help reach the salaries everyone expected and deserved and set a goal.
With that goal in mind everyone in the company was extremely motivated and excited, now all we had to do was to create a plan to achieve that goal.
This helped us visualize where we were standing, and how far off we were. Numbers and estimations were made and luckily we could come up with a number that suited us all! Of course there where some instances to discuss the numbers involved, but it was great to see that everyone was focused on the company and in the number they thought was fair for them.
“We realized that this was working too, because we all really knew the company’s objectives, goals and values”, like some of us wisely said.
After we had all the numbers we could see how far we were from achieving the expected salaries that every one stated.
First thing we identified was that the company needed to find new long -term projects with according rates. With that in mind we began focusing on sales and everyone tried to be involved in different places.
Our main goal was to have a year long plan. We looked at the projects that we had for a while and the most recent ones. Once we had them mall on the table we looked at the numbers again to see if our choices were in line with our new goals.
An interesting thing was that everyone at the company wanted to help out in the sales area, not only because of their personal salaries but because that meant that the company could grow and that each one could work in areas that they had never worked before. This was a big step for us, since we have always wanted everyone to feel part of the family being involved in all the decisions that are made.
We also identified that we had to improve our skills in some of the new technologies that we were not focusing on. With that in mind, we talked about it and decided to start doing internal workshops to be more prepared.
At this point we noticed that this sort of things were necessary on every company since it encourages everyone to improve themselves! Being able to identify what technologies we needed to focus on was not an easy task, so we decided to open it up to personal expectations and desires. So, If there was anyone interested in a specific technology, we facilitated the tools for them to learn and improve their skills on it.
The other main thing that we identified was that we had to do a better use of all the social media channels. We have people who know a lot about how to use those tools and want to share their knowledge, so they are planning a workshop to show us what we can do, and open the tasks so anyone interested can chip in.
Right now we have achieved our first goal: we have improved all the salaries. However we are still discussing and discovering different ways to reach our main goals in a sustainable way.
We really believe that we are building better and more transparent paths so everyone fells good, safe and produdctive doing what they love the most.
Want to know more about us? Visit our social media channels or reach to us now!
