Speaker 1: UM, A couple of years ago, you guys embraced UH
Speaker 1: salary transparency and and one I want you to talk
Speaker 1: about why, why that's important or was important for you guys,
Speaker 1: and steps to doing that well, because I imagine there's
Speaker 1: um a large opportunity there to cause more ruckis in
Speaker 1: the beginning, you know, especially in the beginning. But what
Speaker 1: are the lasting implications of doing that both on the
Speaker 1: positives hide and negative side and steps to doing it well? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So just for context, we did it in two thousand
Speaker 1: and sevent team, so it's been in place since then.
Speaker 1: The reason we did it was for equity, racial and
Speaker 1: gender equity. Lots of great companies, lots of bad companies.
Speaker 1: We're paying people different depending on their gender. Lots of
Speaker 1: well intentioned companies didn't want to do that, but they
Speaker 1: allowed for some negotiation. And so for example of you
Speaker 1: are are if you negotiate a five percent higher salary
Speaker 1: than I do, right for the same position, same work.
Speaker 1: Five years later, you've done fantastic work. You've both gotten
Speaker 1: promotions and both got a bump every single year. That
Speaker 1: difference than amplifies, Right, that's the problem. And then five
Speaker 1: years later you have a company that says the employee says,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I'm being paid how much less? Now
Speaker 1: the company has lost a valuable employee with all the
Speaker 1: institutional memory that problem. So we want to avoid that,
Speaker 1: and the quickest way we wanted to do it was say,
Speaker 1: let's make it transparent, let's make internally transparent, and then
Speaker 1: let's go through a process for engaging our employees to
Speaker 1: make that happen so that there isn't a ruckus. So
Speaker 1: what we did, basically, I just it's it's actually in
Speaker 1: the book fairly explicitly. There's a step by step process
Speaker 1: that we use that anybody can follow. But the first
Speaker 1: thing we did was really simple, are you going to
Speaker 1: leave if we make our salaries transparent? And now down
Speaker 1: twenty people said no, we'll not and one person I'm
Speaker 1: a little uncomfortable, but let's go for it, right, So
Speaker 1: that's the first thing. The second thing was we involved
Speaker 1: them in the solution. There's lots of research to do.
Speaker 1: Is this the right solving? Are there other alternatives? What
Speaker 1: other companies are doing this? But we had a committee
Speaker 1: based on leadership and employees that participated. Why does that
Speaker 1: matter because they're gonna bring different perspectives than I would
Speaker 1: and whatever solution we come up with, they're going to
Speaker 1: participate in. That's going to enable people to feel like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I designed this. Finally, the big actually the big part
Speaker 1: of the work. We didn't have our leveling and we
Speaker 1: didn't have our rubrics very well laid out. That took
Speaker 1: of a seven month process. That took about four and
Speaker 1: a half months to do that. Right, any companies should
Speaker 1: have that anyway, regardless of whether good and salary transparent
Speaker 1: or not. By the time we announced it for seven months,
Speaker 1: the reaction was basically a whole hump it because we
Speaker 1: brought everybody along for the ride. Um. We also did
Speaker 1: one other thing that is a fun piece. It's called
Speaker 1: the pre mortem. I talked about it in the book
Speaker 1: as well, and it's basically a technique to basically it's
Speaker 1: a technique to enable you to project into the future
Speaker 1: and try and avoid problems. So the quick question you
Speaker 1: ask is we did this, okay, team, it's three months,
Speaker 1: three weeks before launch. I want you to project nine
Speaker 1: months down the road. The thing is launched, It reached
Speaker 1: all the people, etcetera, etcetera in nine months. It is
Speaker 1: a complete disaster. Everything's gone wrong. Everybody hates us, We've
Speaker 1: lost customer. Blah blah blah blah blah. What went wrong? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I usually start by saying, yeah, it was me.
Speaker 1: I wasn't paying attention, I didn't answer that phone call.
Speaker 1: Was sload respawn Right. It loosens people up a little
Speaker 1: bit because what you're trying to do is have people
Speaker 1: to be creative. Dan, it starts to come out well
Speaker 1: and that stakeholder, we didn't talk to this person, We
Speaker 1: didn't talk to Oh, we forgot this step. Once you
Speaker 1: gather a bunch of those, you work backwards. So how
Speaker 1: could we mitigate that possibility? It is amazing how many
Speaker 1: things come up that you, even the most diligent person
Speaker 1: did not think of because they didn't imagine the failure
Speaker 1: case down the road. So that's what we did with
Speaker 1: the salary recordees. But I'm sorry pay transparency as well. Um.
Speaker 1: So we tested this thing and we iterated it, and
Speaker 1: we continue to iterate to this day. It's black tech.
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