In the latest episode of the Happier at Work podcast, I had the honor of hosting Virgile Raingeard, the CEO and co-founder of Figures, a conversation management platform. Virgile's extensive experience in HR, coupled with his dedication to creating fair and transparent compensation processes, provided valuable insights into the future of fair pay in the workplace.

Virgile emphasised the importance of basing compensation on actual performance rather than past seniority, disrupting traditional compensation structures. We stressed the crucial role of transparency in compensation, predicting a future where lack of salary transparency will seem archaic and unacceptable.

The discussion shed light on the impact of transparency on closing the gender pay gap and the legislative changes targeting pay inequities in different countries. We also explored the challenge of fairly compensating employees with unique skills and the role of collective profit-sharing schemes in balancing individual pay differences.

The main points throughout this podcast include:

• The importance of basing compensation on actual performance rather than past seniority, disrupting traditional compensation structures.
• The crucial role of transparency in compensation.
• The impact of transparency on closing the gender pay gap.
• The challenge of fairly compensating employees with unique skills.

Do you have any feedback or thoughts on this discussion? If so, please connect with Aoife via the links below and let her know. Aoife would love to hear from you!

Connect with Virgile:

LinkedIn

Website

Twitter

Youtube

Connect with Happier at Work host Aoife O’Brien:

Website

LinkedIn 

Instagram

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

Mentioned in this episode:

Podcast Live Recording

Register to get your tickets for the LIVE podcast recording: https://livepodcastrecording.scoreapp.com

Podcast Live Recording

You are so welcome to the Happy at Work podcast, Virgil. I hope I got my French my French pronunciation okay with that. Do you wanna let people know a little bit about you, who you are, how you got to doing what you're doing today?

Of course. So I'm Virgil. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Figures. So we're a conversation management management platform, sorry, that I created by myself 3 years and a half ago after, a bit more than a decade in HR. Right? So I started my career in HR, in compensation. In fact, moved on to generalist HR roles, a bit of recruiting as well in very large company, then smaller media midsize company, smaller company. And when I was VP of people operation at a small post service, a startup, then I decided to go and create, I guess, a compensation management product I would have loved to use when I was a HR professional because I was frustrated of having to deal with spreadsheets all my life as an HR professional when it came to compensation. And I'm trying to I'm on a mission to change that for other HR HR professionals now.

Brilliant. And I suppose for me, this is for anyone who's not a HR professional, this is kind of like a peek behind the curtain of this is what really goes on in these when you're having these conversations about how much you wanna get paid. What HR are often dealing with is a spreadsheet of trying to keep track of what people's historical salary has been, what kind of bonus they're on, any benefits, all of that kind of stuff. Would I be right in saying that? Because I am not from a HR background.

No. No. But yeah. That's exactly the case.

Yeah. So they're basically working off a spreadsheet. And talk to me about some of the like, I was just imagining some of the things that could go wrong with with working off a spreadsheet to manage people's compensation. But talk to me about, like, what did you see as the big issues?

So let me zoom in on 1 example, right, when I was HR director at Criteo. There was, like, 3,000 employees. I was HR director for tech, 800 employees. We were running annual compensation reviews with, like, spreadsheets, which meant we were sending off by email 1 spreadsheet per manager, which I think was around 700 total spreadsheet flying around the organization Ah. Password protected, where we were asking managers for their input on who we should increase, buy our merchants, and so on. Yeah. Then clicking back all of the information, consolidating everything. So it was a huge waste of time.

Right? And moreover, besides a waste of time, as an HR, what struck me then was when you're dealing with that many strategies, the risk of mistake, the risk of not doing your your your job as best as possible was huge. And in the end, you are not making I didn't feel like I was making the best. So be most fair decision possible when it comes to salary, which is a very important topic. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think let let let's come on to that, this idea of fairness and, like, I'm I'm always so curious because there have been times when I've asked for more money than I thought I deserved and got even more. And there have been other times where I've asked for a higher starting salary, and the recruiter said no, which was I assume that she had gone to the company and the company had said no to her, which I found quite strange, to be honest. And I've had other times where I've got a promotion and asked for a commensurate, let's say, increase in salary and also didn't get it. So I'd love to explore this idea of of how do we make pay fairer. Any any thoughts to share around that?

There's a lot of angles there. And you mentioned all of those during your podcast and and conversation, which I thought was brilliant. So when you did, by yourself, explaining all of your different ex, experiences. So there's a lot of way to make compensation more fair. Yeah. 1 of the biggest way is simply to make it as objective as possible.

Okay.

Yeah. And to move away as much as possible from negotiation. Right? 1 1 of the biggest reason why there's unfairness. Sometimes there's, like, just a company's desire to keep salaries as low as possible and so on and just, like, companies using that against employees, right, to save as much money as possible. Most of time, company are trying to do the right thing, but end up not necessarily making the most decision possible. And often, 1 of the biggest culprit of all that is the room left from negotiation. So more negotiation there is, the more biases you're gonna create Yeah. Especially in the, like, 1 of the biggest creator of the gender pay gap.

Right? Well, you talked about it. 1 of the biggest creator of the gender pay gap is the room left for negotiation because men negotiate more than women and often gets more when they ask for the women. So anytime in this negotiation, there's gonna be a bit of infernus. I mean, there's Yeah. Lots of areas to explore, but this is 1.

Yeah. And can we have a think about that? And I and I can't remember if I brought this up on the podcast before, but I when I was managing someone and she basically used it as a negotiation tactic by saying, I'm going to leave unless I get this pay rise, which is the most incredible form of negotiation and, you know, fair play to her for asking for that. And me in that situation, when we're out of the pay review cycle, let's say, and she was being managed in a few from a few different angles as well. And from my own personal interests, if she left the team, then I'm picking up her workload, which I did not want to do. So, yeah, negotiation and and, I suppose, being held over a barrel, what do you what can we do in those types of situations where it's like, what I do I have a choice here? Is there flexibility to have some sort of negotiation? And therefore, it's always going to be biased in some way.

Yeah. I mean, it's a perfect example of it depends where you're coming from. Right? From a employee perspective. Like, I would recommend a friend to try to negotiate as much as possible, trying to bring up, like, factual elements on market data or whatever on past performance. Yeah. On market value to drive off negotiation from better pay. But in the end, I just said so. It's something I think that should not happen.

And from a company standpoint and from a HR standpoint, I will not allow for out of process, like conversational use. Yeah. I had a firm position being you ask for concrete view, and you're saying you will leave, then you have to leave. In fact, funnily enough, no. I remember 1 1 employee that was like that at the time. He was leaving from Meta or was Facebook at the time. He was like, they're offering this. If you if you match 0.5 stay.

If you don't, I'll go. I was like, then you'll go.

Okay.

And he was like, oh, you you know, they say HR is supposed to be human. You're just a robot playing with your process and your rules, and so that you're you're heartless. Right? He literally said that.

Yeah. And you're

going to Facebook. But my point was, by not doing that, I'm actually trying to care for people because I'm trying to make systemic objective decision and not encouraging people to go out and negotiate, go out and get offers from other companies and get into a vicious circle of, well, once again, negotiation.

Yeah. Can we can we take, a little detour from this idea for a second? It's just that you mentioned, okay, so this person was offered more money and they went off. I'm thinking about it from the perspective that people shouldn't be leaving your organization just for an increase in compensation if you've created an amazing culture and reminded people of how great of a culture, how great of a team they work in, the other types of benefits that they have. Like, really, career decisions shouldn't shouldn't just be about money. Any any thoughts around that?

So I think, ultimately, you're wise, and you talked about this on your podcast. Usually, I like to say compensation shouldn't be the main motivating factor. It's often a demotivating factor. It's often a factor you want to clear. Right? Yeah. You want to clear and make sure that it's not a topic or an issue for people so that they can focus on their role, on their progression, and what they can learn, what they are doing, and so on. On. Right? So you are right.

However, I'll say this, having worked in that field for a while. And and, you know, 1 of the reason I named my company Figures is because of the play on wall. That figures is both, like, figures and numbers and both, like in both French and English language, I picked into, like, a human trait. Yeah. Behind those numbers, there are people, and not everyone has the same relationship with, like, money. Yeah. Like, it can be a highly emotional topic for various users.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can have people that can be obsessed with their cash, with their compensation because they view it as the only way they see their value. So if you're not constantly increasing them, it sure it means you don't care about them, even though they might be super well paid. And so some people have a relationship with money. They might tweak that relationship that you just said. But as a whole, when you zoom out, I'd say that you need conversation not to be a factor in the day to day of your employees. You need to make clear that environment. But for some people, it's a really highly emotional topic.

Yeah. Okay. So if I'm if I'm hearing you, what you're saying is for some people who are maybe driven by success and they associate the value they bring to the organization with the amount that they're being compensated, for them it can be highly triggering and therefore they want to be seen as constantly getting paid the the most. For other people who are not necessarily driven by money, this is a hygiene factor. You need to pay them enough so that they're not worried about how much they're getting paid, and they can get on with their jobs and not think about money in the same way that the other people think about money.

Yeah. And and in the way, it's what you just said is, like, you you need to pay them enough. You need to make them you need to make them confident that they're being treated fairly. Likewise, the perception of fairness is always the biggest thing out there. Right? Yeah. Because some people might be considering that this is not enough for them. I want you to explain out how you work when it comes to conversation, what's fair for you, how you look at market data, how you look at whole performance and so on, and you decide on the package that's supposed to be fair. And you do that for everyone else.

Yeah. Not based on negotiation. Yeah. Trying to be objective and fair. People can be very sure.

Yeah. No. I love that. And we started talking about this idea of fairness in the form that we have a process and everyone knows what that process is for the the compensation review. So, again, if I share a personal example where someone joined the company on a certain amount of money and then out of the, however, we did it in this company that I worked for, it like, to me, it actually did seem quite unfair. So they joined at a certain time of year. You can't have a comp review within the 1st year, and then only then, it's only at a certain time of the year. So they're waiting kind of over a year, at the same time having known knowingly accepted this compensation, they were trying to negotiate out of that review pay review period that they wanted to get more money.

And I was like, my hands are tied because this is how it's done. But I think if we can be more transparent upfront about how we do that, it's it's so important. So the first thing that you mentioned was about having a specific time and a process. Can you talk about, like, what are some of the other fair things that we can do? You you you touched on some of them, like looking at market data, making sure that, like, people know that we're we have this fair process.

Yeah. So it's it's about yeah. So it's about having those fair and objective processes. It's like being clear and as transparent as possible. And I think we can get back to how a transparency is linked to fairness. But being as transparent as possible on how objective you are when you hire someone, what do you take into consideration? Like, experience, experience within the field? Do you take into consideration diploma and so on? What are the factors used to determine the starting conversation of anyone? Right? And how do you ensure it's being as fair as possible? Possible? Yeah. Right? And then the second thing is, when this evolves over time, as we discussed, how do you decide on promotion? How do you decide on pay reviews? What are the criteria used for those? How do you ensure consistency and fairness? And how do you ensure objective decision making and non biased and too discretionary or negotiation based 1. Right? Those those are the 2 main thing when hiring being hired into a company and, like, how your conversation evolves over time, being as objective as possible on those processes and as transparent as possible really assure people that they're being treated fairly.

Yeah. Yeah. No. I think that's I think that's such an something that you raised there about, like, how do you make sure that you're compensating people fairly for the experience that they have and for education? Now, again, we could take a slight detour on the main point of the conversation and say, so, a, does experience equal to like, number of years experience doesn't necessarily equate to people's performance. So someone might you know, I'm sure I've talked about this on the podcast before that someone might have 10 years of experience, but actually they've had 10 years of really straightforward experience where they haven't come up against any challenges. They've rose they've risen through the ranks of their career, and it all looks great on paper. But, actually, if they join a different company where there's a different type of culture or a different type of client or a different type of workload, expectations, or whatever it might be. And then suddenly they're they're facing all of these challenges, and it's like they're in over their head because the number of years experience doesn't equate to what is required in the role.

Any any kind of thoughts around that?

Yeah. And III tend to agree with your, positioning there, but I'd say it's company specific. Right? Company needs to decide what's fair to them and what's their compensation philosophy. I'd like to go what are the core principles they add there too. Some company will say, we want to reward experiences of seniority in the company. I want to reward somebody. And this is what's fair to them. And if they are being transparent about it to our candidates and employees, they will attract people that are like minded.

Now what I view as fair when it comes to seniority, I think we're quite aligned. I tend to say prior to hiring, I'm using seniority as a proxy for future performance. So I'm gonna give it more as a someone with 10 year seniority than someone with 7. Not only because I have a higher market value, because I expect someone with 10 years it should be higher performing than someone with

7

years seniority. Yeah. Reva, once they joined those 2 persons, I'm gonna judge performance. And I expect past seniority to be the driver of future performance because you've seen more things, you've seen more situation, and so on. But if you don't actually perform better than the person sitting next to you with 3, 5 years less of seniority, why should I compensate that? I'm not like, I am actually I'm in in figures. I'm not compensating for synergy. I'm hiring PGS as a proxy for expected performance, but then as a join Yeah. I'm compensating

Yeah. Performance. And I think, again, this ties in with this idea of expectations and setting those really clear expectations about what the role exists for. Is there a problem to solve? Is there a particular, way in which you're expected to perform, which oftentimes and, again, this comes up on the podcast multiple times, the onboarding process, the ex setting clear expectations for people Yeah. So they know how they're supposed to perform. And I think oftentimes, especially when we hire people or when people join a team, we sort of expect them to hit the ground running to sink or swim. You know, hopefully, they swim rather than sink. But there needs to be more of a focus, I think, on setting those clear expectations.

So what is if you're being compensated in this in this way, here are the things that we expect you to deliver in this role in order to maintain that level of compensation?

Yep. Exactly. And in fact, funny stories, like, 3 times in my career, it happened to me that I hire someone that was actually at a level above well, like, I hire someone a certain level expecting a certain level of performance. The person was not delivering enough for that level. And I've gone to them to 3% being like, I'm sorry, but we just thought based on your past experience, you are a senior type of person at this role. Yeah. Based on your professional value on your first 4 months in the company, actually, we think you're, like, 1 level down. Yeah.

We think you're good enough for being 1 level down. But if you you're going to stick with us, it's going to be on the lower salary and 1 title down. Yeah. And, actually, the few times I've done that twice, people are accepted. I'm like, yep. Okay. I agree. And those are 10% of, like, no way.

And then we terminated the person, like, permission. Yeah. Yeah. But exactly what you said. Right? I was like, I'm sorry, but for fairness reason, I don't want to keep you with the title and salary

That's akin to people with a higher level of performance because that's gonna disturb internal liquidity and internal fairness within the company.

Yeah. That I think that's a really important point and a hard conversation to have. And that has happened in a company that I previously worked for as well. I know so just to balance out what I'm saying about them, on the 1 hand, they were, trying to equate the salaries and make sure that the people were being paid across different departments depending on what level they were at. So I I will commend them for saying that. Like, they were trying to raise the salaries in some departments that weren't quite at the level that they should have been. But on the other hand, there was someone working there who had we had a discussion and it was decided that she was operating at the level below. So she moved to technically the level below, but there was never but I do know that that happened, that she time.

But I do know that that happened, that she was continuing to be compensated at that higher level while operating at the lower level, which I think is kind of, yeah, great for her. But going back to your point about fairness, it's kind of unfair for other people that if she's operating at that lower level, but she's still getting compensated for the higher level, expectation.

And the issue is you have 10 people on that role. You have 1 person hiring like, earning a lot more than 9 other people. Yeah. Especially in the era we are going towards, like, with more and more transparencies because of the laws and just, like, history moving towards more and more transparency. This is gonna be less and less acceptable because for 1% of our conversation, you're gonna have potentially 9% frustrated. Right? So Exactly. Besides the fairness, I think it's just a retention and engagement

risk Yeah.

Of the company.

Yeah. And so we've kinda touched on this idea, but haven't explored it in a huge amount of detail, but the idea of transparency. Like, how how can we be bring more transparency to how we compensate people if, you know, maybe some people want to be private about what they personally are are earning, but how do we do that in a in a way that's okay for everyone? And maybe we talk a little bit about how that impacts then on the lives of

the gender pay gap. Yeah. So it's perfect topic because the way we'd like to define transparency as figures, like, we

have this simple framework where it says, like, no are very

little as figures, like, we have a simple framework. We'll say it's, like, no or very little transparency. It's like step number level 1

Yeah.

In which many companies are. So level 1 of transparency, we consider as, like, transparency on the compensation fees or policies. Like, being transparent on which way to pay market, median. This is what type this is what we reward at hiring. We take into consideration. Similarly, I see diploma potentially, like, being clear on, like, the overall philosophy and so on. Step number 2 when it comes to transparency is being clear on the rules, like, such as salary ranges, being progressively clearer on what salary bands are applicable for each role. Starting when you post a role outside of the company or internal starting to be more and more transparent.

And this is what are the applicable salary ranges per position. Right? And the level 3, we say is, like, ultimate transparency. Transparency on what everyone earns, which is the 1 you mentioned, which is a very radical choice that many company don't do. This is what we're doing as figures. So we are adequately transparent. Everyone knows what everyone is earning, but it's not necessarily something I recommend for most, companies and most people because I think it's quite radical. Yeah. However, the level below is what I think every company should strive towards.

You should strive towards being clear and transparent about the rules and the challenges applicable per per rule and so on. Right? And in fact, in a way, you know, it's 1 of those things where I think, like, 20, 50 years from now, when we're gonna look back as a current era where you could, like, do 5 or 6 interviews for all without even knowing the potential salary you're gonna get off of. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's gonna completely crazy to the next generations. Right? We we're gonna look at it like looking at people smoking on planes. Yeah. Yeah. People are gonna like, I think our next generation is gonna look at us like, you guys were. Like, you are doing 5 or 6 interviews, not talking about salary. Yeah. Getting to a final interview and being offered a salary that you had no idea about.

I say that's gonna look crazy.

And and the recommendation is that you don't ask about salary in the first interview because then it looks like you're just there for the money. And it's like if really if you if you explain what the salary range is at the very least in the in the job ad, and we won't go down that rabbit hole of talking about job ads and how bad bad they are, but if you, at the very least, have a range. And if I'm right, they've brought in legislation in some places because I've seen some things in within some, groups that I'm in. And they've brought in legislation to show ranges, but they're they've taken advantage of that now. They're saying, oh, the range is between 0 a100 k, for example. And they're not really saying the range at all because they they're they have to be transparent, but actually, like, that's just taking the piss out of the rules, basically.

Exactly. So, like, a lot of it started. There's been a lot of noise about the US. Yeah. Some states in the US have laws, including state of New York and California.

That's that must be the 1 I'm thinking of. Yeah.

Yeah. Forcing companies to be transparent on Jabad. Some companies like Netflix, if you go on Netflix, a carrier page if you want to, are not playing by the rules. But so more companies are starting to, like, really abide by those laws. Yeah. And we show, like, current and consistent salary ranges. The more of those that don't will look bad, and it won't be necessarily a compliance or legal issue. It'd be more an engagement and employer branding issue for

people.

Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So as it's it's baby steps, but we are going towards it's a norm to put logical and consistent and coherent salary and and. Laws like that are gonna be introduced in Europe. Like, every European country will have to implement similar data flows by 2026. And even going further than salary ranges and job ads, it's gonna be a lot more restrictive. So we are going tending towards that. Right? We are trending towards more and more transparency, starting with job ads, but also internally towards employees.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think And mentioning

I'm sorry, but you mentioned as well, earlier on, I didn't answer to that, link between transparency and fairness and the gender pay gap. What we've shown, we've made those study. We asked all of our client companies, how transparent are you from, like, as I said, 0 to, like, 3 lakhs. Right? Ultimate transparency. What we've seen, the more transparent companies are, the lower there is in gender pay gap. So when you look at, for example, you take the subset of only fully transparent companies

Yeah.

There's no statistical gender pay gap on those companies. When you look at people on the exact same wall, no statistically significant gender pay gap. Yeah. And you look at only companies that have no level of transparency, you do have up to, like, nearly 4% at equal pay gap between people doing the exact same role, exact same location. Yeah. Of course, with a pay gap favoring men.

Yeah. No. That's interesting because, like, for me, the the gender pay gap is largely driven by having fewer women in those senior positions getting getting paid. But are you talking more about pay pay equality at specific levels that they're yeah. To to eliminate that type of discrepancy between what people, what what sorry. What women are getting paid because they're not negotiating or asking for a higher salary at all or when they do negotiate, they're not negotiating strongly enough so that men in similar roles are being paid more.

Yeah. So it's what we like to call the unadjusted gender pay gap, which

is like

15% or 16% in our database of clients,

which is

compared to the average of men and women in 1 organization. On average, men earns 16% more, I think.

Okay. When you

look at people on the exact same role, exact same location

Yeah.

Like eliminating those differences in the seniority, roles, whatsoever, we get to 2.7 or 2.8%. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So for anyone who's listening, it's it's thinking about what that difference means for you. So if if it's a 3% pay rise, if it's a 16% differential between what you're being paid and what you could potentially being paid. And in order to keep the math kind of simple here, it's like if you're if you're earning a 100 k, that's an extra 16 k per year. You know, I think people could make a lot of use of that type of money.

Exactly.

Yeah. Definitely. So in relation to transparency and the direction that like this about? Like, is it a case of I need to actually do a review on my current compensation structure, first of all, because it's a bit out of whack at the moment before I can start revealing what's going on behind the the curtain, so to speak.

Well, it's you're a 100% right. Right? So transparency starts with structuring your compensation processes, having a look internally at potential inequality you have, trying to progressively fix it before you start being more and more transparent. Right? So so what to our circumstances starts with structuring, making solid compensation processes, looking, having an internal audit of potential inequality within your company and trying to have, like, a road map to fix this inequality, which is not gonna happen in a few months. Most companies in nearly all companies, there's a form of inequality. There's people that have been underpaid for years, and you prefer like that in 1 job.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Looking at that first on the path to be more transparent tomorrow. Because the road towards transparency starts with structure in a way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. We're really yeah. So just having those processes. I suppose maybe even taking a step back, it's the awareness that you need to do this because whatever about from a legislation perspective, and this is how we're moving, it's thinking about it from the, like you said, the employer brand perspective.

So the companies that are getting it right in the US versus the or those 7 states in the US versus the companies that are that are kind of just being a bit rebellious with the rules and and how and the different perception that people have in the market of the companies where they're being transparent versus the ones that they're not. I think it it does say a lot, about the people and then having this road map to get to a stage where everything's fixed. I was interested when you're saying, like, that some people are being underpaid for years like that. I think for someone to they probably won't learn that they're being underpaid for years, but they'll be told that they're they're getting kind of a bump in salary every every so often to bring it up to speed. But imagine discovering that you've been underpaid for years because you're hardly going to go back and say, well, I've been underpaid for these past 5 years and where you know, how can I get compensated for that? Like, that's not going to happen, But it's about correcting, I think, going forward, isn't it?

Well, I I'd say this is a path for most companies. But interestingly enough, in the legislation of some country, you could, like, be to telling someone that they've been underpaid for years, and you're trying to correct that guy moving forward could open the door to litigation.

Okay.

The world's past historical differences. So in a way, it's super interesting. On Tuesday, I met with a very large French company who just didn't know this. And so a number of people that have been historically underpaid for years. Like, they know how much they've been underpaid. They have the budget to cover part of all of those disparity

Yeah.

For, like, the current salary, not in years of salaries. Right? Yeah. But they decided not to go forward with the proposal now because they are exactly afraid of telling, hey, Farf. So we are gonna get increase you by 8% this year and, like, to stand down, like, 3% or 12% or whatever because you've been historically underpaid. Yeah. Because they're afraid that it's gonna open the door to wait. I will even if you're not saying I was historically underpaid, if you're giving me this bump, now I'm starting to think of the 10 years I spent with you. And now maybe I should contact a lawyer to see and to sue you for, like, potential discrimination based on pay and Yeah.

Issue. But in that case, you get fined, and you have to pay whatever differences has been judged to be discrimination. So it's a super tricky topic. Yeah. Even company act that are trying to do what we just said, auditing, structuring, trying to close down inequality, are afraid of the potential consequences of, like, opening that Pandora box in a way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can we come back to this idea then of the gender pay gap and, and how does transparency help with that? And I'm thinking, like, another note I made is about this idea of bonuses. And I think oftentimes that's where there could be a discrepancy where men and women are being paid different bonuses, basically. And it's maybe I think in Ireland, it gets picked up, but in in other countries, maybe the gender pay gap, it won't get picked up.

So new legislation is a 100%. So you have good instincts because it's gonna pick up on that. Right? It's not gonna be only about salary. It's gonna be explicit on, like, every pay element is gonna be

Every aspect of the compensation, including benefit in kind and, you know, if you're gonna charge it.

How men and women are receiving it, which is the average amount in each case, and which is, like, the quartile distribution. Yeah. How many women are in the top 25% of people receiving a yearly bonus, for example? In terms of amounts. And, like, you're gonna have to be a lot more transparent. So you want when those the first set of laws started being announced, a lot of companies were like, you know what, people are gonna close down the gender pay gap and salary, but a lot of heat is gonna be hidden in bonuses. No. That's not gonna fly.

Okay. Good.

That's gonna be part of the scope of the origination, like, low as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. No. That's that's definitely good to hear. That's definitely good to hear. Anything else to share before we wrap things up today just in relation to fairness in pay, in relation to transparency?

So the interesting thing, or when I think transparency is that studies have shown that in the past, like, for example, in Denmark, there's been a similar set of laws that passed years ago. What happened is super interesting, and it actually helped close the gender pay gap. Right? But it helped close the gender pay gap by mostly, like, slowing down men's are increasing compared to women's are increasing. So in a way, it didn't come as a benefit of all workers. In fact, it started, like, compressing the difference between men and women, which is kinda good. Yeah. But by lowering the amount of salary increases for men. And 1 of the side effect that happens, which I think is gonna happen at a larger scale in all of Europe and so on, is there were less and less, like, exception made to the performers.

And you talked about this on your podcast. Right? Sometime, those top performers were have a disproportionate impact in terms of performance. Yeah. But companies in a paid transparency, right, in a more transparent setting are more afraid of handing out way larger increases or bonuses to the top performers because Yeah. They have to justify it to everyone else. And that's the big thing with the new year. You're gonna have to justify more and more of decisions. So what happened, and what I'm afraid is going to happen, is many companies are gonna be like, you know what? If I am performing super well but, you know, with those no new transplants, paid transplants, if I give you, like, 12% when everyone else is getting 4, everyone everyone's gonna be mad.

So I'm sorry, but you're gonna get 6. Yeah. And you're performing super well. You'll start performing well, but we're not gonna give you as much as we would like to because we're afraid of the impact on others. And, therefore, what I think is gonna happen is get less and less of those superstar type of increases, and more and more top talent are gonna be hooping companies frustrated by their lack of progression within their company.

Yes. Wow. I mean, that's that's a can of worms. And I did want to understand a little bit more about being compensated for what you bring to the table for the skills that you have. So you're hired for a particular role, but maybe you have a unique ability that people weren't aware of, and you're bringing your role to this role that you have. And, again, you know, when I was doing my masters, we did talk about, like, oftentimes, we look at the bell curve, and I think a lot of companies are are operating on this bell curve. Again, correct me if I'm wrong. People are looking at, like, what are the the top, 10%, the bottom 10%, and maybe the middle or 15 15 and the middle 70%, whatever way they do it in terms of especially when it comes to compensation, to increases, bonuses, that kind of thing.

But actually sometimes the bell curve is not it doesn't cut us. You have these extremely high performers who are massively outperforming everyone. And what happens? Are they then are they highly motivated by money, and therefore, they're gonna look for somewhere else where they can get paid more, basically, and there's no cap on whatever they can earn, is there an option where the team sees how well they're performing and it's okay to be transparent and it's something that other people can maybe aspire to be a little bit more like? Is it that they're not that highly motivated by money? They don't mind if they don't get paid that much. They want to see more of the impact, or they want to progress more so they can move up to the next level, and then they're not limited by the the band that they're in currently, but they could be promoted and perform at that next level. Like, there's I suppose there's so many different Yep. Potential scenarios in this case.

So let me, open up. It's it's there's a we could spend an entire podcast on this 1. Right? But to open up on what you said and open up 1 1 perspective, some companies are very fine. It's part of their philosophy to give out super super high reward to superstar performers. Right? And they put that as part of their culture, and it works well and people understand. However, it's always a risk when it comes to internal fairness because there's another force that will come at odds with transparency. Yeah.

Because, you know,

I can't remember what was the exact numbers of the study, but it says, basically, most people think they are above average, which is statistically Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Impossible. So it's super

hard for some

people to accept that someone is way outperforming them. For most people, it's hard. So it is still hard sometimes to, like, single out someone and be like, hey. Everyone, this person is way better than anyone else. So so really you're gonna get much less. Your your average, his superstar, it's a tough message to convey, especially when most people think they're not. I would

say Yeah. They think they're special in some way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. And so 1 last, thing that I think will be happening is and we see happening is the rise of, like, freelancing and self employment. I see more and more of the people are gonna be like, you know what? Being an, like, being an employee puts me into the kind of framework that's super rigid and hard to move on from. Yeah. And I'm seeing more and more of those. People are becoming self employed very early in their career and are making as freelancers way more than they were making or could be making as employees, and they move out of the rigidity of the salary review systems and so on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting, actually. So many other topics I think that we could talk about on another full podcast episode. Something else that occurred to me just as you were reviewing that was the idea of team performance. And it becomes less about the individual and becomes more about how can we perform as a team and someone who's a team player rather than a star performer on their own and how we are contributing to the success of the team and we need every single person on that team and we need each other to bring the best out in each other and we're compensated then as a team in terms of bonuses, pay reviews and within the bands, within the scales. Any any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I think it's it's it's often super hard to implement. A lot of people in fact, generationally, when you look at the new generations, they tend to be more motivated on average by, like, collective rewards than individual rewards. So, like, the individual paper performance is less popular for the newer generation than it was for the, like, 20 or 40 years ago. So that's stuff to explore. Yeah. But I'm on a team per team basis. It's hard.

However, a lot of companies are looking or should be looking towards, like, company wide, like, profit sharing schemes and stuff like that. That is like, we all win together in a way if we achieve this, this, and this. Right? So colleagues, you know, personally, I'm a huge fan of that. I also think there's a big benefit. Those are the, like, rewarding an entire group of people instead of seeing 1 person. It's like, it can balance out differences in pay by people due to their market value. So for example, I can have I have in my organization people that have, like, 5 years of experience. 1 is a software engineer and earns, like, 65 k.

The other is a customer support agent and earns 35. Yeah. This is fair because in a way, because it's a reflection of them. Yeah. Value and value of their skills. We've also compensate for those differences that are high differences in pay, we have, like, a collective reward scheme that reward everyone to the same amount regardless of individual salary if we achieve our collective, like, objective. And in a way, it's a way to balance out individualization of pay with a collective reward, and I think it makes sense. It resonates with most of our people.

Yeah. No. I think that that that kind of twofold approach, I think, makes a lot of sense. And I while I was thinking about that, I'm like, if someone has a unique skill set, they need to be fairly compensated for that. And if they have a skill set that not a lot of people have or that's in high demand, which I understand in, you know, software development and and things like that would be, they get compensated fairly because otherwise, if you're getting paid 35 k and you can get 65 k somewhere else, you better be sure that you're gonna go whether you like the culture or not, it's like you're going somewhere else to get paid 30k more. But then also bringing this sharing into like, we're all in this together, and this is the value of the the skills. Or sorry. This is not just the value of the skills that you bring, but this is the contribution that you've made to the success and profitability of the organization, and we want to share that with you.

Exactly.

Brilliant. Nailed it. So, Virgil, if you could say, like, what does being happier at work mean to you? Philosophically speaking, what do you see as this kind of goal of happiness at work?

So I think if if I look personally, it's always been 2 things. Right? It's been what I have to do on a day to day basis. So I'm personally not driven by I never knew where I wanted to be in 5 years, 10 years, even 1 year.

I I

like to when I wake up the morning, I look at what I have on the agenda. Does that motivate me? And do I like who I'm going to do it with? Right? Yeah.

Yes. 2

criteria. Yeah. Since the company and culture that I've built at Figures afterwards kind of matches that it's not about the destination. It's more the journey, like, creating a picture where people like to get to work and enjoy what they do and who they are doing it with. I say it's a bit tricky because now that I'm leading a company, I do have to set a vision and enough staff for where I want to be for but this doesn't come naturally to me because I'm type of, you know, I'm here for the ride. As long as I wake up in the morning, I'm happy to get to job. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy, but now I have to push myself to actually be a bit more forward looking than that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. That makes total sense. And if people want to find out about you, if they wanna find out more about figures, what is the best place they can do that?

LinkedIn is probably the best case if they can manage to type my name, which I'm sure they'll be provided as well.

We'll put the links in the show notes anyway. Yeah. So people can can link directly from there. Yeah.

LinkedIn's the best place for sure.

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed this. And I know listeners are gonna, I think, enjoy from thinking about their own compensation, but also understanding a bit more about the process are HR leaders listening, just some ideas of, like, how to start making changes to make pay more transparent, to make it transparent, to make it fairer for people, and to, you know, steps towards closing the gender pay gap as well. So thank you so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it.

Thanks Thanks for being very, Aoife.