Last Updated on March 17, 2024 by Umer Malik
Ever since the employees were asked to work from home due to the coronavirus, they have found comfort in working remotely. They no longer want to come to the office. After all, WFH allows them to transition seamlessly from work mode to casual mode, enabling them to relax a bit by watching something on their Cox cable.
Plus, they won’t have to get ready and travel every morning to their office or even no need to call on Cox customer service number. This has made senior management and leaders a bit worried. They now wonder how to convince them to come onsite again.
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Compensation: A Deciding Factor
One factor that the leaders should look into when deciding how to (or not) bring employees back to offices is compensation. They will need to have the answers to the following questions:
- Should they adjust salaries for those employees who have moved to another region?
- Is it fine to alter the pay for workers with the same title, performing a similar role, when one is on site, and the other is remote?
- How can they educate the geographies that doesn’t understand the value of equity?
The answer to these questions is different for different companies. For instance, Google deducts the pay of those employees who are working from home. Employees at Adobe can simply decide the days when they want to work from home, and their salaries are not impacted. And then there is LinkedIn that has gone fully remote, implementing a permanent WFH policy.
3 Common Mistakes Startups Make When Setting Pay for Hybrid Workers
When it comes to startups, their compensation plan can hugely influence some important growth metrics like creating a culture of trust and retaining top talent. Therefore, they must pay heed to their compensation strategy. With that said, here are three mistakes that startups make when setting wages for hybrid workers.
#1. Compensating Employees Based on Their Resumes
A candidate’s resume is probably the most important thing. It can help tell if the person is suitable for the job or not. Also, if he/she has relevant experience in the field. However, there are two problems. The first is that a person who has an outstanding resume can be very expensive.
And since you are a startup, you know cash is a finite resource. Therefore, hiring an expensive candidate is not the right solution. The second problem can be that the person may be good at writing resumes but not so efficient when it comes to doing the job right.
So, what is the solution? It’s simple; take their test! You can assign them a small task that is relevant to the job and then see how they perform. If they are successful in completing the task, you can think about hiring them. And then set the compensation according to their performance.
#2. Using Below-Average Data for Competitive Analysis
For being fair and just to your employees, you will need to see how the salary of your workers compares to the market. And for that, you will need one thing, and that is data. Of course, the old data will never work if you are going from an office to a remote setting.
And though you may find it tempting to use the data that is available online for free or use the survey that you might have purchased previously, understand that both of these options are risky. The information that you may collect from the compensation surveys has become outdated. Also, spreadsheets are always prone to errors. Why? Well, simply because it involves manual work and anyone can make mistakes.
So, what should you do? Go for real-time, accurate, and recent data. And make sure that the data you obtain should include information about what other companies are paying to the employees based on role, industry, experience level, and geography. For instance, financial startups will need to acquire different data sources than tech startups.
#3. Lack of Transparency
If you are a startup, then you must have a transparent policy when it comes to compensation. The hybrid workers should be aware of how much they are being paid. Just because they are operating remotely doesn’t mean they don’t get to have the same treatment as those working onsite. Therefore, you should be open discuss every aspect of the compensation plan with them.
Conclusion
Setting the right and just compensation for the hybrid workers is really important, especially when you are a startup. You should neither offer them a lot of wages nor too little. It is necessary to strike a balance.
It is only going to benefit your company in the long run. Also, if you want to be a bit generous to your onsite workers, then you can be. It might encourage those working remotely to join the office as an onsite employees as well.
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