Tips for remote teams
💡JC's Newsletter #128
Dear friends,
In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate.
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💡Must-read
👉 How to calculate compensation for remote employees (Remote)
To calculate compensation for remote employees, you have a few options.
You can pay everyone based only on their experience and role, regardless of their location.
➡️ My favourite option in a world where all companies are poaching talents anywhere in the world.
You can also consider cost of living to adjust pay for your remote employees based on where they live.
If neither option sounds appealing, you can make up your own formula to determine remote worker compensation.
It is a global market:
With global employment solutions now allowing companies to hire top talent all over the world, you cannot offer poor pay and expect to attract the best workers.
Companies that do not hire remotely may believe they only have to compete with other local businesses for local talent, but they are mistaken.
➡️ I really believe we are in a global market now and you should have the same global grid.
The strategy of remote:
Remote establishes a salary baseline at the 65th percentile within the market for each position based on cost of living and alignment to industry standards. That means salary considerations at Remote start at 15% above the market median.
The 65th percentile is only the baseline — people may earn more or less.
How to include local constraints:
Regarding mandatory allowances or bonuses in certain countries — for example, 13th month pay in Mexico or the 8% holiday bonus in the Netherlands — we take a global approach to include country-by-country factors into our benchmarks and do not add them on top of other compensation.
➡️ I like this approach.
Examples of companies:
Basecamp: Pay the same salaries to everyone, everywhere
Basecamp simplifies salary calculations by paying everyone the same amount based on seniority level.
Basecamp sets its salaries to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco market, so people who work at Basecamp are compensated very well.
This strategy guarantees Basecamp the ability to handpick top talent from around the world.
➡️ Should it be our approach to it? It might be the least efficient upfront (you feel you are overpaying) but I think it is the one that allows us to attract and retain the best talent and force high talent density.
Buffer's salary calculator provides a quick and easy way for companies and individuals to see what Buffer might pay a person in a certain position.
The calculator uses a base salary for each role and multiplies by the person's cost of living. Base salaries are set at the 50th percentile of the San Francisco market.
Highly qualified candidates living in areas with low costs of living may use the calculator and decide not to apply because they could make more money elsewhere.
GitLab has a complex salary calculator for remote employees. They use the following formula:
SF benchmark x Location Factor x Level Factor x Experience Factor x Contract Factor x Exchange Rate
Like Buffer, GitLab further modifies salary calculations by level and experience. They add a bonus for employees who are contractors, as contractors have to cover more of their own costs and do not receive employee benefits.
➡️ The world being more and more global, I think we should adjust all grids to our most competitive market and have a single grid. What do you think?
🏯 Other interesting articles on being remote
👉 [People] Total Rewards (Remote)
Salary benchmark and grids:
When a salary benchmark is provided by Total Rewards for new hires, pay increases and promotions, we take a global approach (that is also aligned with the market data that we benchmark against) to consider & include all mandatory allowances & bonuses (such as the 13th and 14th month salaries) in the gross annual compensation amount.
Therefore, for payroll purposes and for employees to know, these allowances and bonuses should not be added on top of the benchmark provided, and instead the salary benchmark provided should be considered as base salary + mandatory allowances.
Examples of mandatory allowances included in the benchmark:
In the Netherlands, we include the 8% holiday allowance within the gross annual compensation benchmark.
In France, we include the home working allowance within the gross annual compensation benchmark.
➡️ I agree with this approach.
There are many positives to using Geo Pay Ranges. These include:
Higher pay than using local/in-country rates
More frugal than Global Pay which is important considering we are a young start-up and this will ensure we grow and expand well
A great way to attract global talent
Ensures fair and equitable pay in regions with similar cost of living standards
➡️ I prefer to be global and one grid and pay top market.
Paying at the 65th percentile means that we pay 15% above the market rate regardless of geo range.
➡️ Interesting benchmark.
Cycles:
Main Cycle (Compensation Review) - Will take place in May/June (salaries effective 01 July), will be linked to worker’s performance and include all employees in Remote
Second Cycle (Market Check-in) - Will take place in Oct/Nov (salaries effective 01 Dec) and include those exhibiting improved performance as well as exceptions (e.g. - employee was missed in previous cycle)
Promotions are possible in both cycles but not limited to these two cycles, provided all criteria for promotions are met.
➡️ Interesting how they approach their reviews cycle.
👉 If you haven’t thought about hiring a head of remote yet, should you? (Sifted)
“I think of my role as a glue between different parts of our organisation,” says Black, who has a team of eight at Oyster, including a remote experience manager, a remote operations manager and a director of education.
“On the operations side, it’s a lot about increasing levels of visibility and autonomy so that people can work asynchronously. There’s a lot of work there involving knowledge management, project management and defining ways of communicating and collaborating with each other across time zones.”
👉 Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston on the future of work
Working remotely:
The company scaled back their real estate footprint and reconfigured its offices into “Dropbox Studios” for convening and collaborative co-working.
A lot of startups, even pre-COVID, have a retreat model where they take the money they would have spent on an office, throw that into getting the best Airbnb for a week, and their team goes offsite to gas up their relationship tanks. There’s a lot to like about that model where you recharge everybody, make sure you get a thoughtfully-curated dose of relationship, team building, and culture, and that carries you through the quarter, or doing the rest on Zoom.
Thinking long-term:
The markets have a mind of their own, and you either fit into what they're looking for or not. And there’s a relentlessness to it. The only solution is to build a great and enduring company.
Part of the CEO’s job is to keep people’s chins tilted up and towards the long term. Great companies have to solve for that whether they’re public or private.
👉 People challenges 🧐 (Startup Life by Sifted)
With a fully remote team distributed across 48 countries, we realised early on that working remotely in a startup of this scale, growing at this pace, is not for everyone — but it is for some people, and that’s who you want to hire.
To find them and avoid high turnover, be explicit about what it means to work in your company at interview stage: what rituals do you have, what does an average day look like, how do you connect as a team... even emphasise obvious things like not having after-work drinks on a Friday because you’re remote.
Invest heavily in the excitement of the first day. It’s difficult because new joiners are at home, often without a separate workspace, but your role is to help them make the psychological adjustment between home and work.
🤑 Compensate remote workers fairly. When you’re hiring across the world, it’s important to decide how you’re going to structure salaries. Are you going to pay everyone the same across the board or adjust it based on their country’s cost of living?
🗞 In the news
📱Technology
👉 WorkOS: Enterprise’s Great Equalizer (The Generalist)
WorkOS is not just a provider of SSO.
Software companies can rely on WorkOS to achieve enterprise readiness in a fraction of the time.
WorkOS reduces the time it takes to set up enterprise SSO by as much as 90%. It has a similar impact with other features like Directory Sync.
For example, any big customer needed Nylas to provide Single Sign-On (SSO) support so that employees could access the service without setting up new usernames and passwords.
Enterprise clients follow the same pattern, according to Nakul Mandan. They start by asking for SSO before demanding directory sync (SCIM), audit logs, role-based access control (RBAC), and change management. “Typically, SSO is the first thing they ask for,” Mandan said, “But it’s not the last.”
The first request enterprise clients typically make is for SSO support. Clients want their employees (or customers) to be able to login into a new product with an established identity provider like Google, Azure, or Okta.
Directory Sync addresses another common request.
Organizations sync their “directory,” typically from an HR provider like Workday or Rippling, or an IT system like ActiveDirectory.
By adding a little code to their product, startups can offer Directory Sync that integrates with more than twelve directory services, including Workday, BambooHR, Breathe, and Rippling. Organizational information stays updated via webhooks, meaning that anytime an employee is added or subtracted from the core directory, WorkOS captures that change and ports it over to the startup’s product.
Nick Van Wiggeren, VP of Engineering at PlanetScale, a WorkOS customer, remarked that it often took teams of up to seven engineers just to maintain SSO support.
➡️ Interesting tool to look at to accelerate enterprise readiness.
🏥 Healthcare
👉 Coup d’arrêt pour le Health Data Hub, la plateforme controversée qui centralise les données de santé des Français (La Tribune)
L'Etat met un coup d'arrêt au HDH sous sa forme actuelle.
Il s'apprêterait à repenser son fonctionnement de fond en comble, pour "repartir sur de bonnes bases".
"La demande d'autorisation adressée à la CNIL concernait la centralisation, au sein de la Plateforme des données de santé (HDH), des données du Système National des Données de Santé (SNDS). Cette demande a en effet été retirée."
"Le HDH accompagne aujourd'hui 55 projets avec ses partenaires et une dizaine accèdent déjà, ou sont sur le point d'accéder dans les prochains jours, à la plateforme technologique.”
La plateforme Health Data Hub (HDH) regroupe de larges volumes de données -dont certains très sensibles- issus des organismes publics de santé, afin de les mettre à disposition de projets de recherche triés sur le volet.
La première de ces co-entreprises a été annoncée quelques jours après la stratégie : il s'agissait de Bleu, composée des technologies de Microsoft hébergées par Orange et Capgemini. "Le Health Data Hub n'avait pas prévu la possibilité de migrer, donc ils étaient techniquement coincés avec Microsoft, leur codage avait été fait sur des bases Azure, nous raconte une source. Bleu a représenté l'espoir d'une solution car comme Microsoft fournit la technologie, il n'y avait pas besoin de refaire l'architecture de la plateforme".
Problème : Bleu n'est toujours pas près de voir le jour.
"Orange et Capgemini ont beaucoup de mal à travailler ensemble pour le stockage des données, et Microsoft dispose de spécifications particulières pour faire tourner ses commandes. Concrètement, Bleu est embourbé.”
👉 Founder Q&A: Rachel Sanders of Apex Optimizers (Fitt Insider)
Apex Optimizers is the first collaborative NFT project focused on health and human performance optimization across sleep, nutrition, fitness, mental clarity, and more.
Owning an Apex Optimizer unlocks real-world benefits like product drops and discounts to top health brands, access to pro athletes and health experts, giveaways, virtual and in-person wellness experiences, and a community of health enthusiasts.
Community members represent brands like Eight Sleep, Rootine, Hydrant, Span Health, Bioloop, ALOHA, Gwella, OneSkin, and Bristle. Also joining are early team members from Levels, health experts like Louisa Nicola and Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz, professional athletes like Justin Gatlin, as well as a number of high performers and crypto and NFT heavy hitters like Anthony Pompliano and Steve Aoki.
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