Salary Prototype

Defining and setting salaries in a different way

In our times, money is omnipresent and when raised as a topic, it does something to us all.cIn our society personal worth is often equated with money, be it through salaries for our work or the worth of things we own. Therefore we often don't talk about the money we earn and in an employment setting it stays a very vague process of why someone gets what salary. This again leads to societal issues such as gender pay gaps and also lowers trust between people in organisations as money is just not a topic we transparently talk about (at least in matters of salaries). In the spirit of "living the future we want to see already in the now" we wanted to find an alternative approach to this topic and a prototype on how we could set our salaries in a more regenerative, transparent and self-organised way.

After a first attempt with a need-based approach (where you would earn what you actually need for a living and a life that fulfills your well-being) we co-developed the current salary prototype as a next step. We decided to come up with a prototype that can calculate salaries based on certain categories. It works in the same way for everyone and is transparently visible. First, we had something around 20 categories (see bottom of the table). In the end we decided to reduce them to three categories that we can compare or calculate*: experience, responsibility in the project, time spent within collaboratio helvetica (* of course a certain amount of subjectivity is also given within these categories). The calculation of this salary prototype starts with a basic income which will be increased according the numbers put into the three categories. We set a "basic income" with the intention that all of our work has a similar value - against the current reality where there are often huge pay gaps between work "we" value more than others (e.g. cleaning forces versus bankers). What number you get in the categories "experience/education" and "degree of responsibility" is co-defined between an employee and the others of the team with the help of a dialogue circle and Consent-Decision-Making. The category "time spent" gets calculated on the basis of how long (how many months) you have been working for collaboratio helvetica at what working-%. This in relation to the person who has worked the longest for collaboratio helvetica (this person gets the highest number of 5 in this category). We re-evaluate our salaries twice a year.

Our salary prototype will be continuously co-developed. Maybe at one point we change the approach again, completely. 

We have co-developed the first version of this salary prototype within the collaboratio helvetica team in a workshop and since have further adapted it. 

With our approach to prototype the way we set salaries within collaboratio helvetica we hope to create approaches that allow for more trust, self-responsibility and also well-being within teams. In the current system we all depend on an income but this income should not be the ultimate goal of an employment. To shift this perception we openly look at the topic and will continue to try out new approaches to how we define, distribute and handle money. 

Each team member gets rated by itself and the team from 1-5 in the 3 criteria.

Each team member gets rated by itself and the team from 1-5 in the 3 criteria.

Even though we chose an open and experimental approach to this topic and looked deeply into it, we are still attached to the topic of money. We take uncertainties and questions around our prototype and the way we define our salaries as learning fields to look at this very important societal issue. 

Contact

Would you like to test our salary prototype within your own team? Do you have other interesting approaches to define salaries? Reach out to: hello@collaboratio.ch