As a fully distributed company, we’ve made a bold decision not to anchor pay to employees’ physical location, no matter where they are in the world. This means that an employee who works as an Engineer 2 in a rural town in India will be in the exact same salary band as an Engineer 2 who is working from San Francisco, CA. We’re calling this “One Job, One Pay” (OJOP).
We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA. This allows us to offer highly competitive salaries to top talent across the world.
OJOP is representative of how we value, care for, and reinvest in our people without compromising our company values. It’s the idea that the value of the work is inherent in the work, in and of the work itself. It moves beyond the arcane practice of pricing a job based on location. OJOP is not determined by the personal details, life choices, location, employee’s gender, race, background, or any other factor external to the value that the work provides.
This approach is one of the most straightforward ways to make work and pay as globally inclusive as possible.
It is not about who you are, what you are, what your background is, or where you live. It's about the work that you produce. It’s about your contribution and participation. We value your impact.
It's what's best for our company
OJOP is our way of ensuring success by prioritizing the company’s most valuable assets, its people and proprietary technology. It is a form of de-risking the business by ensuring that we can attract and retain top talent best suited to build our product.
The work-life revolution, which I refer to as The Great Realignment, is causing companies to rethink how they compensate and treat employees. This has presented our startup with an opportunity to think through how we can provide equal and fair pay and create a culture that defaults to transparency to optimize for better outcomes.
Compensation. It's a surprisingly controversial topic, but it doesn't have to be.
Leveraging our culture of "default to open"
Stellate adheres to this value: Default to open. Usually, opacity is the starting point, and you have to justify transparency. In our case, our starting point is transparency and we have to justify opacity. It doesn't mean that everything's open, but that openness is where we begin.
Living up to this value and showing up to the world entails pushing forward radical inclusion within our company. This includes paying equal compensation. When compensation is hidden behind some level of opacity, the company has the power to hire people at different rates even though they're doing the same job. We are neutralizing that by choosing to reveal our bands.
We don't just release publicly available bands. The transparency continues internally; every employee knows how much everyone is getting paid, including equity.
While some would argue that publishing compensation data erodes privacy, we default to the broadest definition of “open” by only publishing the band but not the level and stage of salary of our employees.
We are committed to ensuring fair pay while protecting everyone's privacy.
We have been advised that it’s risky, we have been advised that it's costly, and we have been advised that it's a distraction–but we believe that one job one pay goes hand in hand with pay transparency. So, we’re tackling both in one fell swoop.
We’re very comfortable with pay transparency because, we will be ensuring global pay parity through one job one pay. These two initiatives naturally go hand-in-hand as a low friction means of ensuring that we are adhering to the policy.
Implementation of One Job, One Pay
As elegant as “One Job, One Pay” sounds, its implementation is complicated and far from perfect. We’re not pursuing perfection but rather rapid learning and iteration.
As part of our One Job, One Pay, rollout, we’ll publish the pay range for each job. Every applicant will see what their salary would be based on the job to be done. We'll publish internally the more granular levels and sub-levels for each job. This creates an environment where we can remove the pressure of negotiating salary, which has historically been wrought with bias and discrimination.
We will conduct an annual salary review to ensure that our comp strategy is following market guidance from reliable data sources, which we will publish each year.