Transparent By Default: New Blog Post

New blog post from @jonas: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/10/transparent-by-default/

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“Emails that meet one of a small number of exclusion criteria, such as those directly related to salaries or somebody’s personal circumstances are not visible to everyone.”

I thought the bit about salaries was interesting considering this bit from yesterday’s piece on diversity: “We operate a fixed salary structure, which means that two people contributing to our company in the same role at the same level receive equal pay”

If there’s a transparent, fixed salary structure then why are salaries within the exclusion criteria?

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While it is good comparable posts get the same gross salary, different individuals have different personal financial positions depending on previous tax years salary and any collection or reimbursement thru an amended tax code, different marital status and the ability to transfer a married persons allowance between partners, other additional earnings from a second job impacting tax code, etc, so net earnings can vary between two people on the same gross earnings. It is therefore inappropriate to discuss take home pay or tax codes openly as that is more personal than more general gross figure publication

From a fair salary framework you can infer some people’s salaries, but that’s different to having everyone in the company knowing exactly what you earn - if we were to share everyone’s salaries, I’d want to get explicit consent from every person first.

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Why should a person have their personal circumstances divulged to their colleagues? While publication of gross salaries may be acceptable, it is arguably not the concern of other staff if someone is married or single or in a common-law relationship or has so many kids etc, their personal circumstances and the impact of those on their tax or benefits is surely one area where the individuals privacy should be respected?

Maria, there is a case in Scandinavia where everyone in the country including their prime minister has their annual gross taxable earnings publicly published and accessible on the internet!

To add to what Maria has already said, we also allow employees to trade off salary for equity to accommodate for their lifestyle and risk appetite. People should be able to decide for themselves whether they would like to share their choice with their co-workers.

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I know that Buffer’s been a big influence on Monzo in some areas - Tristan tweeted that the transparency page was inspired by them.

Their approach is to share the specific salaries (& how they were calculated) for everyone at their company -

https://open.buffer.com/transparent-salaries/

& I appreciate the fact that, that’s a pretty radical approach. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Monzo had considered it so I’d be interested to hear whether there are certain reasons why this wouldn’t work for Monzo - before I campaign for this with my employer, sometime in the future…

Following @jonas’ comment, if Monzo did want to take this approach, perhaps they could publish each employees salary as it would be if they had decided not to trade part of it for equity?

Is there actually a fixed salary structure of discrete points where individuals receive the same amounts (once you take trading off equity into account) for doing the same work or is there just a fair salary framework where you try to ensure you’re paying people of similar abilities similar amounts?

Sounds like we should write a blog post about salaries soon!

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Wondering why people are so interested in salaries people at get at :mondo: :question:

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Personally I’m not. But it’s an area of interest for most people in any job & Monzo aggressively adopt leading edge practises so it’d be good to hear their thoughts on this.

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I’d be interested in the context of fair pay across the company/industry and avoiding the slope down to creating “banker’s bonuses”.

For me, if you’re paying regularly, reliably and without errors, you’re already beating what I get paid! :joy:

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