payment, salary, hoursWe are a startup of 6 people, and we want to calculate the salary of the staff. But the problem is that the staffs’ conditions are really different:
As you see, it is very difficult to calculate the salary based on the daily worked hours.
So, how should we calculate the salary of staff?
Even a startup should have a CEO. Someone should be making the decision here.
It seems like you’ve already listed out the major factors, but you left out two very important inputs: skill and experience.
The largest your company gets, the less people should be talking about who gets paid what. It shouldn’t be general knowledge and it shouldn’t become a democracy.
As a startup cofounder, I know it’s important to discriminate on these factors and hold 1-on-1 conversations and be logical. It’s likely, especially in a startup, that everyone will discuss their salaries with each other and it’s your job to hold fair logical procedures for evaluating it - everyone likes the idea of fairness: your employees working less shouldn’t make as much as those who work more, unless somehow they provide a skill which is more valuable to the company in less time (at a proportionate amount).
tldr; I wish I could just say salary_calc = 32000(1/2skill_rating)*(40/num_hours_worked) where skill_rating is .1 - 100 depending on skill and industry
Furthermore, I see little reasoning in paying more OR less to remote workers, unless they are using home equipment which you provide a stipend for work expenses & external communication in place of office supplies
To me, the only factor that seems relevant in those that you listed is whether they’re expected to work full time or not. The only question that really counts is:
At what price point are they not actively looking for a new job?
Keep market rate in mind: what you should pay your staff to work for you is more or less what they can get away with by working elsewhere. Ideally plus some, to make sure they stick around instead of looking at job listings. Market rate is extremely subjective, of course. Two similar profiles might command very different salaries owing to better networks and/or past experience.
Ask what individual members in your team what they’d like to get paid (as in “fair” to them), rather than what pay seems “fair” to the others. Bring it up in 1-1 conversations: you might discover that your engineers have interviewed for $10k/mo positions in SV but are happy to work for a lot less to stay near home, while the others’ sorrier day to day reality amounts to catching an occasional $5 job on Fiverr. If so, you should probably pay the former more than the latter - there’s a lot more risk of them going away.
Two asides:
I can say a lot of things, but I can hardly compete with the amazing open salaries at Buffer. It is a great implementation that is currently being field tested and they do provide all the details you would need to build a scheme yourself. ( Buffer Salaries )
I'd suggest calculating 'fair' salaries based on your industry salaries and your current financial capabilities. After that - calculations based on worked hours for creative jobs are hardly useful.
I'd just suggest tracking speed ( using an Agile methodology - Scrum, Kanban and so on ) and make sure that everyone is doing their best to improve your speed of development since it's the most vital factor for a hatchling venture.
'Fair' salaries combined with ever-improving speed is how you're going to find the best people for your company - while too expensive people might not come and too slow people are left out - everyone else would be a perfect fit.
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