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The Myth of Self-Set Salaries

Writer's picture: Klaus WuestefeldKlaus Wuestefeld

Updated: 18 hours ago



There's nothing sexier for a company's employer branding than to state that each employee can simply set their own compensation.

It's just not true.

To get a raise at companies which make use of "Self-Set" Salaries, first the employee has to go through a formal peer advisory process. After that, the employee has to present and defend their case before a committee that can veto the new salary proposal if they think it's too high.

Charles Towers-Clark, CEO at Pod Group, warned a person who'd proposed a 50% raise in their own salary: “you can take it but if you become uneconomical or your value is not justified then that will only end one way”. Understanding the threat, that person reduced what they were asking for.

Evgeny Shadchnev, founder and CEO at Makers Academy, claims that making such a high salary might go against the employee's own best interests, considering their workmates expectations will grow accordingly. Also, trust and respect can easily be lost in case they feel performance is not compatible with the new compensation.

Instead of being decided only by frank, open discussions, "Self-Set" Salaries are regulated by team resentment and peer pressure.

That is not a place I want my company to be in.

In addition, Evgeny acknowledges that the advisory process for salaries demands too much time and effort. It requires their company to grant a two-day leave a year for every employee to write their own proposal so that the process can be carried out. Their process is made up of no less than 7 steps.

At Smarkets, salary reviews are performed every six months and an employee who wishes to earn a raise must build their business case comprehending a new salary proposal based on performance, market rates and peer feedback, which will be evaluated by peers and HR. The process ends when a deal is settled but the negotiation period might still be extended, which is perceived as a great disadvantage.

This illusion of "Self-Set" Salaries was created to meet the wish for autonomy and transparency in compensation processes and also the need for companies using systems such as Teal, Holacracy and flat hierarchy to set salaries without centralizing the decision-making.

Transparency in the process of compensation is, in fact, a fundamental aspect in fostering the team's sense of justice, improving levels of engagement and reducing turnover, as we have seen in this article. To state, however, that it is possible to use a method in which salaries are ”self set” is a huge myth, since the team is the de facto regulator of what is acceptable when it comes to salaries.

There is nothing wrong with using of a frank negotiation process involving a committee or a compensation circle. The problem comes with misleading people, with pretending that they are the ones who set their own salaries.

Can we have a compensation process which is autonomous, transparent and fair, without being as complicated and delusional as "Self-Set" Salaries?

One answer is a simple, effective process called Team-Set Salaries (TSS). It allows each team member to intuitively appraise the contribution of their colleagues in under 15 minutes. By applying an elegant algorithm to these appraisals, TSS yields an actionable, numerical result that splits up the compensation budget like slices of a pie.

Instead of pretending to avoid it, TSS realistically embraces the zero-sum nature of individual compensation and eliminates the "popularity contest" politics of traditional peer reviews.

Learn more about the Team-Set Salaries process in this article and make your compensation processes easier, while promoting collaboration, fairness and transparency.


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