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Pay equity playbook
Level and promote equitably and fairly
Using a leveling rubric helps make leveling decisions more objective and more equitable.
Principle #1: Ensure your organization has a structured career ladder that defines levels in the organization with objective language
Define each level and function in the organization by skills/competencies and behavioral values, if possible.
Skills & Competencies: A way to make this more specific for your engineering team is, for levels where you're heavy (more junior engineers and more junior lead/manager role), list out specific competencies or skills that are part of owning/being an expert in the role. It may be very useful in spelling out objectively how someone can expect to advance.
Examples of competencies or skills
Leads code reviews
Translates
Demonstrates fluency in X and Y languages as indicated by ability to train junior team members
Leads hiring processes for new team members (for manager level)
Executes cross-functionally prioritized roadmap
Behavioral values: Another element to consider adding are cultural values and behaviors. What are the choices you want your team members to make when you're not in the room, or when there is a difficult tradeoff to be made? Is there a way to codify those by level?
The rationale for including this is so that your team understands that merely excelling in one’s role is not all it takes to advance. Ie, you can't just be a (the phrase Arianna Huffington coined when she was on Uber's board during the Susan Fowler scandal).
Our company’s behaviors and values help codify how we want employees to act and the choices we want them to make when we’re not in the room. It’s so important as we scale and add new layers of management between me and the team. ーB round founder and CTO
💬 Conversation Starter
"Besides skills and competencies required for specific roles, what are some of the behavioral values (spoken or unspoken) your organization generally expects from employees?”
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🛠️ Tools/Resources
Leveling
With Otis (withotis.com) resources
2019 (effective 2021) Colorado pay equity law summary, which mandates leveling [LinkedIn article]
Individual contributor framework, adapted from Radford [Blog post]
Values
Defining your organization’s values
Renegade Partner’s values and why values matter
Principle #2: Use your career ladder consistently to level new employees and promote people internally
An employee’s level is typically determined by two things:
New employee leveling
When you are determining the level of a new employee, share the leveling rubric with them and your rationale for leveling them at a particular point. Listen to them if they don’t agree with your assessment, and consider their perspective.
You don’t need to get into a long negotiation and you don’t necessarily need to deviate from your position in the case of a disagreement, but it’s important to set up a new employee for success and part of that is transparency and managing through conflict.
In some cases, an employee may disagree so much that they decline the offer. This is certainly frustrating, but in general, it’s better to have that than to set them up for failure or dissatisfaction with a different level. If this happens a lot, you may need to check that the levels within your organization are relatively consistent with market.
Existing employee leveling
When discussing promotions and leveling of existing employees, always refer back to the rubrics you’ve created. Avoid squishy language discussed
. After any promotion cycle, check the data against overall company demographics to see if there was potential bias. Also analyze duration in role by demographics to ensure that women and people of color aren’t being promoted more slowly.
💡 Note: A common biased practice is promoting women and people of color based on past performance, and majority group men on potential. Avoid this. Choose how your company wants to promote (performance OR potential) and stick with it for all employees.
💬 Conversation Starter
“What are some of the ways we as an organization can move towards more fair and equitable leveling and promotion practices?”
Instructions: Anyone signed into this Coda doc can submit and vote on discussion topics in the table below without the subconscious bias of new rows, blinking cursors, author avatars, and increasing vote counts. Then jot down notes during the ‘live’ discussion.
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🛠️ Tools/Resources
💡 Note: While I don’t universally advocate for this particular practice, I do think it’s becoming an increasingly popular trend and some regulations will nudge companies there in the next 2-10 years
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