Usually, the team does not know the size of the salary of its leader and does not participate in its approval process. But this can be changed. One fine day in 2023, the owner of a company decided to conduct an experiment. He invited the testers to assign him a salary.
The main idea of the experiment is that the team decides what tasks their manager will perform and what budget they are ready to allocate to pay for their work. After all, the leader works for the team. The leader provides the necessary resources. Also, he maintains the integrity of the work of the team. Moreover, he helps to cope with situations where employees lack competencies. Also, he works with the culture and motivation of employees
and sets the motion vector, and helps set goals. Also, his imagination can help the team to chill and rest from the working routine by providing some discounts or chilling applications. You can test one of those by yourself by joining the link betamo.com/en-NZ/promotions.
When the leader trusts the team, the team begins to trust him in return. And trust is an important component in the foundation of team building. The more united the team works, the more efficient and faster it shows results.
Coordinate The Process Within The Team
First, it is worth discussing the idea within the team. Everything should be ready for such an experiment because the main burden of decisions will fall on the team. It is the employees who will have to determine the areas of responsibility and the amount of payment.
To do this, the team must have a sufficiently high level of trust to openly discuss, suggest and somewhere criticize their own leader.
Define the rules of the experiment
To implement the experiment, you need to take into account all the restrictions that you may encounter in the process. Those are financial, bureaucratic, organizational, and other processes. And build the process so that each member of the team can freely express their point of view. They have identified the following inputs.
- The decision must be unanimous and unanimous.
- This should fit into our infrastructure processes.
- Any final decision will be made by the leader and be considered fair.
Write The Expectations From The Leader
Ask employees to describe what they expect from the leader. That can be about any kind of responsibility, decisions, actions, and results.
The company’s employees created a separate channel in Slack. The team discussed and prescribed the expected tasks for the manager. Without different arguments in favor of one or another rate, such talks won’t last long. They made their own decision. They added the leader to the channel only at the end to show the selection process and the result. So the leader at the end could check all the management routes, discussions, ideas, etc.
Determine The Salary
The company’s team offered their own version of the hourly rate and the bonus part. But the head of the company decided that this was too much. According to his working time and not being fully involved in the processes, he has decided to reduce his salary.
In response, he offered to pay 75% of this amount as a rate, and the remaining 25% as a flex. That is, the manager tracks the number of hours worked per month and receives 75% for them, and receives an additional 25% as a bonus for a good result. In the end, the team agreed on that option.
Results Of The Experiment
The whole experiment from the moment the idea was born lasted about six months. It started in November 2022.
- From November to January, the idea was discussed only with the company’s team.
- Since February, the company has fully launched the process and updated the salary.
It took a long time to launch due to the high workload of the team for the main tasks and the need to think over new processes for the company. For other teams, this period can be reduced to a month, since the processes have already been established.
The leaders of other teams and employees reacted with enthusiasm and gave only positive feedback. Let’s see if any of the leaders will agree to such an adventure and will entrust the team with the choice of salary.
It is important to note that the company treats this as an experiment and a non-standard approach, and not as a permanent rule. Perhaps this practice will be transferred to other departments and become the norm throughout the company. Or it will remain an experiment and be forgotten in a couple of months. The company is ready for any outcome if it is better for the team.
In any case, the leader of the experiments gives a piece of advice to conduct such experiments in a team on a regular basis. It helps to look at business processes from a different perspective. It also builds trust between employees and managers and makes their relationships more transparent.
