CHAPTER 10The Physiology of Pay
The compensation specialist at a company I was working with came to me one day with a thumb drive of pay data from the last 10 years. He was exasperated.
“Sara,” he said, “every year we run a pay gap audit, and we find gaps. We increase salaries, and years later the gaps are back. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. What am I not seeing here? How is this possible?”
He wanted me to review his spreadsheets and find a bug, an error in their pay analysis algorithms. I removed the thumb drive from my USB port, closed my laptop, and asked him a few questions:
“Do you use referrals for hiring?”
“Do you invite candidates to negotiate their offer?”
“How do you use self-evaluations?”
He was flustered and annoyed. “Why are you asking me this? We're talking about pay.”
I, also, was talking about pay.
I understood his confusion, and I explained that the data in these spreadsheets were just symptoms. To stop them from recurring, we had to find out what was causing them. Left untreated, these gaps would open back up, and they could cause other problems, like attrition, low morale, and low productivity. The salary increases were just short-term Band-Aids, and the spreadsheets didn't capture the cause or the full impact of pay inequities.
The pay data was only the anatomy. We needed to understand the physiology.
Pay Does Not Exist in a Vacuum
When I tell people that my work focuses on workplace equity, they often say, “Oh, like closing the pay gap?” I'm never ...
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