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