22 ms·

I froze the salaries of my executive team to benefit other workers

480 points by otikik 7y ago

chmod775 7y ago
Why does a company with only 500 regular employees even have 20 executives in the upper bracket? Are they just overpaid sales people? If the upper 5% at my company earned enough to double the wages of the other 95%, I'd be pretty damn mad about those leeches. Especially if the company is already struggling.
- Angostura 7y ago
  CEO CFO Head of Marketing Head of Sales Chief Security Officer Head of IT Head of Clinical Services. Head of HR .. off the top of my head. Shouldn't be too difficult to add in the remaining posts
  - chmod775 7y ago
    HR should be about 5 people in a 500 people company. There's not much space there for a hierachy with much of a pay gap, unless you're going to pay a direct superior >500% more. Same with most other roles at such a company.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      I worked for a company that had about a thousand people in the UK and it had 2 people in HR (it was part of a much larger multinational). Mind you - they didn't get involved in hiring at all - only processing people during acquisitions and handling layoffs and disciplinary matters.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  What they have on the website: * Chief Executive Officer * Chief Medical Officer * Senior Vice President, Human Resources * Chief Customer Officer * Chief Legal & Strategic Solutions Officer * Chief Financial Officer * President and Chief Operating Officer * Chief Compliance Officer * Chief Technology Officer * Chief Growth Officer In addition their board has 8 members.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    What the hell is even "Chief Growth Officer"? Asking for real. Growth is either achieved organically or you are just forcing your way to a lucrative exit without bringing any value. Artificial and forced growth is toxic for the economy at large. The rest of the roles mostly make sense although I believe some of them can be merged so further savings can be accomplished.
    - shalmanese 7y ago
      "Growth" is one of the most misnamed and misunderstood roles because, as you correctly noted, everyone in the company should be responsible for growth. I explain to everyone about my role that it's not the responsibility of the Growth team to deliver Growth, it's our responsibility to put Growth more under the companies control. We act like a team of scientists to empirically try and understand what drives our growth and then build out systems, tools and processes to measure & improve those factors. YC has a good guide on what kinds of roles a Growth team is responsible for and what good Growth people do: https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/
      - pdimitar 7y ago
        What you say softens it a little but IMO growth still should be organically achieved first and foremost and not chased after to please investors. Bringing real value for customers should weigh much more than the approval of a bunch of golfers. "Growth" in the terms you describe should be more like "marketing": what other market niches can we fill, are our prices reasonable, can we expand to country X, etc.
    - oldjokes 7y ago
      Yes, but investors don't care about profit or sustainability anymore, always just this perpetual, artificial growth. A million years ago when I was young the IPO market used to be the end of the bullshit, you actually had to make money and have a long term plan. That is no longer true, the fictional growth narrative is demanded over actual money now.
- ptah 7y ago
  500 at the very bottom, many more in between
- edh649 7y ago
  It's 500 entry level jobs, not all remaining 500 jobs. I presume there are many people between the bottom 500 employees and top 20 executives
- johntiger1 7y ago
  According to glassdoor: 1 to 5k employees, 2-5 billion in yearly revenue https://www.glassdoor.ca/Overview/Working-at-CareCentrix-EI_IE318139.11,22.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Overview/Working-at-CareCentrix-EI_...
- rc_kas 7y ago
  > If the upper 5% at my company earned enough to double the wages of the other 95%, I'd be pretty damn mad about those leeches. I'm pretty sure every large company in America matches that criteria.
omgwtfbbqhihihi 7y ago
me thinks the shitty 7.25 an hour is to blame.
petercooper 7y ago
I was thinking the math didn't work out, but it does. If you ignore taxes and say a raise of +7.50 an hour for a working week comes to around $14500 extra a year, over 500 employees that's about $7.3m. If that were split into 20 executive bonuses, that'd be $365K each.
- locklock 7y ago
  And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    Isn't money used to buy luxury things supposed to stimulate the economy that would then stimulate the job markets and then trickle down to people ? /s edit: forgot the /s
    - hedonic_ 7y ago
      Yes and no. Give someone earning $7.50/hour more money and it gets spent and put back into the economy like you said. Give someone earning a base salary of say 500k more money and it gets put into a bank to earn them even more money, taking it out of the equation.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        I don't support trickle down economics, but it's not the case that money in banks is just sitting around in a vault. The banks actually do stuff with the money. For example it's loaned out to real world businesses.
        mschuster91 7y ago
        > The banks actually do stuff with the money. For example it's loaned out to real world businesses. Traditional loan business is not the core business of banks any more, at least not where the big profits come from.
rjf72 7y ago
I don't understand something from this article: "Our margins had declined and our revenue growth had stalled. ... I was becoming increasingly worried about our team and our turnover numbers. We are a people business and in some divisions we were losing 30 to 40% of our teammates within a year. My HR staff suggested that we re-think our recruiting and training – which made sense – but I thought that we could do more. I thought we needed to reconsider how we supported and paid our team. For our entry level jobs – where turnover was the highest – we paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (or less than $16,000 per year). ... I took my concerns to my team. After many tough conversations, it became clear that we could not simply raise wages and hit our budget." This just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Recruiting and especially training has a very real cost for non-trivial jobs. Why would they pay minimum wage when they seem to be acknowledging that not paying minimum wage would increase their profits? This is something companies learned in the early 20th century. Henry Ford was the first employer to institute a higher minimum wage for his employees (doubling the average pay of the time). He didn't do it because he was a nice guy, he did it because he found that increasing the minimum wage reduced turnover which meant less spent on training and a general increase in productivity and profits. The same reason he would also go on to standardize what we now consider the normal 8 hour work day / 40 hour work week. This seems very much like a story of a very poorly managed company. A minimum wage is appropriate when it's appropriate. When you're losing 30-40% of your employees, likely in meaningful part due to wage, and it's costing substantial amounts to replace and retrain for their roles - it's not appropriate. It seriously seems like at times that MBAs should be relabeled to masters of business annihilation because that's invariably where these incredibly myopic views on labor:costs:revenue seem to come from. --- edit: confirmed. Here [1] is their board. And indeed it's just an MBA pack. [1] - https://www.carecentrix.com/about-us https://www.carecentrix.com/about-us
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pcurve 7y ago
  I used to work for some of those guys (very indirectly) when they used to work at Medco as senior execs making millions. They are smart guys that don't need $$$ at this point. In their defense, operations/call center leaders are very metrics and cost-driven at most companies. 50% annual attrition rate is business as usual. Driving down call volume, average handle time, and increasing first-call-resolution are name of the games. Call centers are viewed only as cost center at most companies. This trend has been changing in the past few years, so I'm glad they are also in the right side of the fence.
mathattack 7y ago
If you take this at face value, those top 20 execs must have been extremely highly paid if freezing their wages allowed this to happen. (As math done by others shows - giving 25 people a 15K raise is ~350k. That means those top people were expecting raises of that much. Implies a crazy base) I suspect there is more to the story. Either the raises paid for themselves via lower attrition, or perhaps came with added productivity. If you look up the company on Glassdoor, there is a lot of negativity towards management.
WrathOfJay 7y ago
I think it's great that this company did this, but this article is a puff piece. There's no real data here. He just states that the `business tripled`. What does that actually mean? Did it triple in revenue? How did increasing the entry-level pay result in that? And how did your non-entry level employees handle the lowest wrung earning far closer to their own pay? How many executives decided that the freeze wasn't in their own best interest and left? You can't just sacrifice and redistribute and expect it to be all roses. The details matter, especially if you're trying to convince resistant minds that it's a good thing.
- mgbmtl 7y ago
  It's a newspaper article, the aim is to raise awareness. People should read this and wonder if/how it applies to their company. It's easy to forget how the lowest-paid in a company are often key people in having operations run smoothly. If they have trouble paying their bills, often on sick-leave, etc, it can have an impact on everyone else (causing delays, quality issues or security issues). Ideally, you invest in fixing both the technical and the underlying social issues.
  - WrathOfJay 7y ago
    With something this important, I'd expect something more substantial than the equivalent of "I stayed on this diet for a year and it worked! I shrunk by 1/3rd!"
- onetimemanytime 7y ago
  Puff piece or not I don't get what you want from him? Scans of their IRS taxes? It's an article to show what they did, not a step by step manual, will every single detail. Now if he lied, he'd be called on it
  - WrathOfJay 7y ago
    How about something a little bit more than "it worked" and "business tripled". An analysis of contributing factors, maybe. There's so much bullshit in the media with people claiming things that are half-truths, or outright lies. It'd be nice for something like this to have some actual justification to support it. Warts and all.
dhx 7y ago
> My HR staff suggested that we re-think our recruiting and training – which made sense – but I thought that we could do more. I thought we needed to reconsider how we supported and paid our team. Sounds like a situation right out of Yes, Minister. HR staff not being forthcoming with the obvious answer of increasing pay to lower attrition rates from 30-40% due to the attitude of the board/CEO and anticipation of their negative response.
- BioMeditate 7y ago
  I've always wondered if companies even need a HR? Especially when they are huge separate departments.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    At some point every company needs someone to handle those duties. Payroll & benefits, recruiting, onboarding & offboarding, these sort of things don't just sort themselves out on the side and quickly become full time positions that require dedicated individuals.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ben509 7y ago
    Most of HR is just meeting federal regulatory compliance requirements.
allworknoplay 7y ago
This is insane -- paying a $7.25/hr minimum wage to people you call "teammates" and expecting them to stick around is preposterous. In anything but a terrible economic downturn, minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them. Why would anyone stick around, or care to do more than the most basic job requirements? These jobs are totally disposable to employees, just as the employees are disposable to the company. If you don't want your employees to leave, don't treat them as disposable, and don't belittle them by pretending you're a team. This guy thinks he stumbled on some grand new lesson, and it's hilariously terrible.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know.
  - 14 7y ago
    I am guessing they don’t expect loyalty but rather desperation and the need to pay bills. Use the person until they move on and get a new one. I make about 9$ an hour above minimum wage and I can not even fathom how a person on minimum wage survives.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      That may be the pragmatic assumption, but I've worked my fair share of low paying jobs, and there's a ton of talk of being part of the team.
      - c0vfefe 7y ago
jordanpg 7y ago
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs See also: https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
- asdff 7y ago
  What a find! There are a lot of jobs that are complete bullshit, especially in finance and tech. That hot new app or device isn't a necessity, its decoration. Things got done before slack existed, so why are some brilliant people wasting their time and life working tirelessly to optimize slack? People might get promoted and pat themselves on the back for reworking some aspect of the snapchat back end, for instance, but are you gonna put that accomplishment on your tombstone? Will your project ever come up in university CS lectures, or even see the light of day to be cited by other researchers? The iPhone Xs doesn't do anything fundamentally different than the first iPhone, and people buy new ones every year to do the same emailing, texting and calling, and web surfing they've always done since their first smartphone. There are people who are striving daily to make missiles more lethal, advertising more addictive, consumption more rampant, the environment more polluted, and shareholder profit more exponential. A lack of fulfillment in the majority of straight out of undergrad private sector career paths is what got me interested in grad school, to spend my time and effort working on a topic that's explicitly not bullshit.
Miner49er 7y ago
It's amazing this article even needs to be written. You'd think the executives pulling in these crazy salaries would be competent enough to know that paying their "team members" next to nothing is going to result in high turnover and be a bad business decision in the long run. This article frames his choice to actually pay his employees as some big discovery, but it's not. The fact is, execs already know, but they put their short-term greed over what is best for their employees, the company in the long term, and their communities.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Lots of things persist because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. Probably what’s going on here, in my opinion.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - JimBrimble35 7y ago
    I think what you are identifying as incompetence is, in fact, well-aged malice. The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is. The fact that this article's author seems to find it novel to trickle down the proceeds of the company to the bulk of it's employees is a pretty good indication of that.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      > The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is. I know you think you’re arguing against me, but what you described supports my position.
      - _1100 7y ago
        Agreed. It doesn't matter if it is hard to recognize, if you are unable to understand something then you are by definition incompetent with respect to the task or idea.
rayiner 7y ago
I wish redistribution to the very bottom was a bigger part of the political debate. Our politics is currently focused on redistribution from the very top to the middle class. (Stuff like free college or universal healthcare would primarily benefit the top half, because those folks are the ones who are in a position to be accepted to and attend college, and aren’t already covered by Medicaid.) The math of that is tough, because 70% of all income is earned by households in the 50-99% income range (between $40,000 and $480,000 household income). But the bottom 50% earns just 11% of all income, a little over $1 trillion. You could really improve their standard of living with even modest redistribution of the $9 trillion earned by the top 50% to the bottom 50%. But unfortunately middle class taxation is a complete non-starter in the US, even though that is how almost all European countries pay for their welfare states.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  It's also crazy to me that the whole framing is around providing money for investment when any stimulus to the end consumer is going to inevitably end up at the top (it's not like money flows many other directions in the long run in our current system).
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Because all politically profitable strategies at increases taxes for the rich are always about giving a benefit to the most politically powerful group: the middle class. A society where the top 90% pitches in to help the 10% in distress is very different to the one where the middle 50% takes from the top 25%, and leaves some scraps to the bottom 25%. - Milton Friedman
- OliverJones 7y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, the feds and the states (in the US) should pass laws like this: Employers are liable to the government for four times the cost of providing SNAP (f/k/a food stamps), public housing, and other welfare benefits to their employees. 1/3 of any fines collected in this way would be payable to citizens who report the problems. It's totally unfair for the taxpayers to subsidize businesses by feeding and housing their underpaid employees. The point of the draconian 4x charge is to make it less expensive for companies to do the right thing and quit with the starvation wages already. But legislatures work for their donors, not their citizens, so it won't happen.
Circuits 7y ago
This seems like the equivalent of a man walking up to a homeless person, kneeling and handing the man $5 while his wife takes a picture of the action... Oh! You have an ounce of humanity left in your slowly freezing heart, you want a cookie jackass? Had the top 5% cut their salaries in half and disbursed it equally to the bottom 5% then I might have been impressed but anything short of that and you aren't going to get me to bat an eye.
golergka 7y ago
And this is exactly how wage rises should work: business-driven decision without any government intervention. Good job.
brianpgordon 7y ago
> last year we broadened profit sharing to all levels of the company So... do executives think this means something to people? This incentive seems comically out-of-touch. I guess because CEOs live and breathe stock valuation-based bonuses they naturally assume that everyone gets motivated the same way. But it seems like a stretch that strains credulity to think that someone making $15/hr and getting a microscopic slice of revenue would develop a sense of motivation from the fact that their personal call-center interactions might maybe increase their share of revenue by a few pennies a week through slightly happier customers.
anon4lol 7y ago
I really hate articles like this. The company provides home health visits, requiring a nurse. Nurses don't work for $7.50 hour. Reading closely, it was for entry-level positions, probably in a certain department. Skilled positions would require market rates. Translation: in an economic down turn they killed the bonus, raised the pay for customer service reps, and are now claiming a moral victory as if the growth was caused by paying people more.
huxflux 7y ago
That's called being an startup, any other news?

480 points by otikik 7y ago

Why does a company with only 500 regular employees even have 20 executives in the upper bracket? Are they just overpaid sales people? If the upper 5% at my company earned enough to double the wages of the other 95%, I'd be pretty damn mad about those leeches. Especially if the company is already struggling.

Angostura 7y ago
CEO CFO Head of Marketing Head of Sales Chief Security Officer Head of IT Head of Clinical Services. Head of HR .. off the top of my head. Shouldn't be too difficult to add in the remaining posts
- chmod775 7y ago
  HR should be about 5 people in a 500 people company. There's not much space there for a hierachy with much of a pay gap, unless you're going to pay a direct superior >500% more. Same with most other roles at such a company.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    I worked for a company that had about a thousand people in the UK and it had 2 people in HR (it was part of a much larger multinational). Mind you - they didn't get involved in hiring at all - only processing people during acquisitions and handling layoffs and disciplinary matters.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
What they have on the website: * Chief Executive Officer * Chief Medical Officer * Senior Vice President, Human Resources * Chief Customer Officer * Chief Legal & Strategic Solutions Officer * Chief Financial Officer * President and Chief Operating Officer * Chief Compliance Officer * Chief Technology Officer * Chief Growth Officer In addition their board has 8 members.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  What the hell is even "Chief Growth Officer"? Asking for real. Growth is either achieved organically or you are just forcing your way to a lucrative exit without bringing any value. Artificial and forced growth is toxic for the economy at large. The rest of the roles mostly make sense although I believe some of them can be merged so further savings can be accomplished.
  - shalmanese 7y ago
    "Growth" is one of the most misnamed and misunderstood roles because, as you correctly noted, everyone in the company should be responsible for growth. I explain to everyone about my role that it's not the responsibility of the Growth team to deliver Growth, it's our responsibility to put Growth more under the companies control. We act like a team of scientists to empirically try and understand what drives our growth and then build out systems, tools and processes to measure & improve those factors. YC has a good guide on what kinds of roles a Growth team is responsible for and what good Growth people do: https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-guide2017/
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      What you say softens it a little but IMO growth still should be organically achieved first and foremost and not chased after to please investors. Bringing real value for customers should weigh much more than the approval of a bunch of golfers. "Growth" in the terms you describe should be more like "marketing": what other market niches can we fill, are our prices reasonable, can we expand to country X, etc.
  - oldjokes 7y ago
    Yes, but investors don't care about profit or sustainability anymore, always just this perpetual, artificial growth. A million years ago when I was young the IPO market used to be the end of the bullshit, you actually had to make money and have a long term plan. That is no longer true, the fictional growth narrative is demanded over actual money now.
ptah 7y ago
500 at the very bottom, many more in between
edh649 7y ago
It's 500 entry level jobs, not all remaining 500 jobs. I presume there are many people between the bottom 500 employees and top 20 executives
johntiger1 7y ago
According to glassdoor: 1 to 5k employees, 2-5 billion in yearly revenue https://www.glassdoor.ca/Overview/Working-at-CareCentrix-EI_IE318139.11,22.htm https://www.glassdoor.ca/Overview/Working-at-CareCentrix-EI_...
rc_kas 7y ago
> If the upper 5% at my company earned enough to double the wages of the other 95%, I'd be pretty damn mad about those leeches. I'm pretty sure every large company in America matches that criteria.

omgwtfbbqhihihi 7y ago

me thinks the shitty 7.25 an hour is to blame.

petercooper 7y ago

I was thinking the math didn't work out, but it does. If you ignore taxes and say a raise of +7.50 an hour for a working week comes to around $14500 extra a year, over 500 employees that's about $7.3m. If that were split into 20 executive bonuses, that'd be $365K each.

locklock 7y ago
And if you're getting a $365k bonus you are likely already so rich that the money is only going for luxury things while for someone making $7.25 it's quite literally the difference between living in a car or not. I wonder if you could apply this to the rest of American society...
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  Isn't money used to buy luxury things supposed to stimulate the economy that would then stimulate the job markets and then trickle down to people ? /s edit: forgot the /s
  - hedonic_ 7y ago
    Yes and no. Give someone earning $7.50/hour more money and it gets spent and put back into the economy like you said. Give someone earning a base salary of say 500k more money and it gets put into a bank to earn them even more money, taking it out of the equation.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      I don't support trickle down economics, but it's not the case that money in banks is just sitting around in a vault. The banks actually do stuff with the money. For example it's loaned out to real world businesses.
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        > The banks actually do stuff with the money. For example it's loaned out to real world businesses. Traditional loan business is not the core business of banks any more, at least not where the big profits come from.

rjf72 7y ago

I don't understand something from this article: "Our margins had declined and our revenue growth had stalled. ... I was becoming increasingly worried about our team and our turnover numbers. We are a people business and in some divisions we were losing 30 to 40% of our teammates within a year. My HR staff suggested that we re-think our recruiting and training – which made sense – but I thought that we could do more. I thought we needed to reconsider how we supported and paid our team. For our entry level jobs – where turnover was the highest – we paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (or less than $16,000 per year). ... I took my concerns to my team. After many tough conversations, it became clear that we could not simply raise wages and hit our budget." This just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Recruiting and especially training has a very real cost for non-trivial jobs. Why would they pay minimum wage when they seem to be acknowledging that not paying minimum wage would increase their profits? This is something companies learned in the early 20th century. Henry Ford was the first employer to institute a higher minimum wage for his employees (doubling the average pay of the time). He didn't do it because he was a nice guy, he did it because he found that increasing the minimum wage reduced turnover which meant less spent on training and a general increase in productivity and profits. The same reason he would also go on to standardize what we now consider the normal 8 hour work day / 40 hour work week. This seems very much like a story of a very poorly managed company. A minimum wage is appropriate when it's appropriate. When you're losing 30-40% of your employees, likely in meaningful part due to wage, and it's costing substantial amounts to replace and retrain for their roles - it's not appropriate. It seriously seems like at times that MBAs should be relabeled to masters of business annihilation because that's invariably where these incredibly myopic views on labor:costs:revenue seem to come from. --- edit: confirmed. Here [1] is their board. And indeed it's just an MBA pack. [1] - https://www.carecentrix.com/about-us https://www.carecentrix.com/about-us

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pcurve 7y ago
I used to work for some of those guys (very indirectly) when they used to work at Medco as senior execs making millions. They are smart guys that don't need $$$ at this point. In their defense, operations/call center leaders are very metrics and cost-driven at most companies. 50% annual attrition rate is business as usual. Driving down call volume, average handle time, and increasing first-call-resolution are name of the games. Call centers are viewed only as cost center at most companies. This trend has been changing in the past few years, so I'm glad they are also in the right side of the fence.

mathattack 7y ago

If you take this at face value, those top 20 execs must have been extremely highly paid if freezing their wages allowed this to happen. (As math done by others shows - giving 25 people a 15K raise is ~350k. That means those top people were expecting raises of that much. Implies a crazy base) I suspect there is more to the story. Either the raises paid for themselves via lower attrition, or perhaps came with added productivity. If you look up the company on Glassdoor, there is a lot of negativity towards management.

WrathOfJay 7y ago

I think it's great that this company did this, but this article is a puff piece. There's no real data here. He just states that the `business tripled`. What does that actually mean? Did it triple in revenue? How did increasing the entry-level pay result in that? And how did your non-entry level employees handle the lowest wrung earning far closer to their own pay? How many executives decided that the freeze wasn't in their own best interest and left? You can't just sacrifice and redistribute and expect it to be all roses. The details matter, especially if you're trying to convince resistant minds that it's a good thing.

mgbmtl 7y ago
It's a newspaper article, the aim is to raise awareness. People should read this and wonder if/how it applies to their company. It's easy to forget how the lowest-paid in a company are often key people in having operations run smoothly. If they have trouble paying their bills, often on sick-leave, etc, it can have an impact on everyone else (causing delays, quality issues or security issues). Ideally, you invest in fixing both the technical and the underlying social issues.
- WrathOfJay 7y ago
  With something this important, I'd expect something more substantial than the equivalent of "I stayed on this diet for a year and it worked! I shrunk by 1/3rd!"
onetimemanytime 7y ago
Puff piece or not I don't get what you want from him? Scans of their IRS taxes? It's an article to show what they did, not a step by step manual, will every single detail. Now if he lied, he'd be called on it
- WrathOfJay 7y ago
  How about something a little bit more than "it worked" and "business tripled". An analysis of contributing factors, maybe. There's so much bullshit in the media with people claiming things that are half-truths, or outright lies. It'd be nice for something like this to have some actual justification to support it. Warts and all.

dhx 7y ago

> My HR staff suggested that we re-think our recruiting and training – which made sense – but I thought that we could do more. I thought we needed to reconsider how we supported and paid our team. Sounds like a situation right out of Yes, Minister. HR staff not being forthcoming with the obvious answer of increasing pay to lower attrition rates from 30-40% due to the attitude of the board/CEO and anticipation of their negative response.

BioMeditate 7y ago
I've always wondered if companies even need a HR? Especially when they are huge separate departments.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  At some point every company needs someone to handle those duties. Payroll & benefits, recruiting, onboarding & offboarding, these sort of things don't just sort themselves out on the side and quickly become full time positions that require dedicated individuals.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ben509 7y ago
  Most of HR is just meeting federal regulatory compliance requirements.

allworknoplay 7y ago

This is insane -- paying a $7.25/hr minimum wage to people you call "teammates" and expecting them to stick around is preposterous. In anything but a terrible economic downturn, minimum wage says to employees that you just want a body doing a job right at this moment, but aren't willing to invest any further in them. Why would anyone stick around, or care to do more than the most basic job requirements? These jobs are totally disposable to employees, just as the employees are disposable to the company. If you don't want your employees to leave, don't treat them as disposable, and don't belittle them by pretending you're a team. This guy thinks he stumbled on some grand new lesson, and it's hilariously terrible.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I was watching a sitcom called Superstore a little while ago, features the employees in a Wal-Mart like store, and the protagonist got a promotion to the head of the store. There was a whole plot line about how her wage was now in the 6 figures, and I was incredulous until I did a bit of research - Wal-Mart store managers can absolutely make that much money while their employees live in poverty. How you could make that much and expect loyalty and sacrifice from your staff who make a fraction of that, I won't ever know.
- 14 7y ago
  I am guessing they don’t expect loyalty but rather desperation and the need to pay bills. Use the person until they move on and get a new one. I make about 9$ an hour above minimum wage and I can not even fathom how a person on minimum wage survives.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    That may be the pragmatic assumption, but I've worked my fair share of low paying jobs, and there's a ton of talk of being part of the team.
    - c0vfefe 7y ago

jordanpg 7y ago

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs See also: https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...

asdff 7y ago
What a find! There are a lot of jobs that are complete bullshit, especially in finance and tech. That hot new app or device isn't a necessity, its decoration. Things got done before slack existed, so why are some brilliant people wasting their time and life working tirelessly to optimize slack? People might get promoted and pat themselves on the back for reworking some aspect of the snapchat back end, for instance, but are you gonna put that accomplishment on your tombstone? Will your project ever come up in university CS lectures, or even see the light of day to be cited by other researchers? The iPhone Xs doesn't do anything fundamentally different than the first iPhone, and people buy new ones every year to do the same emailing, texting and calling, and web surfing they've always done since their first smartphone. There are people who are striving daily to make missiles more lethal, advertising more addictive, consumption more rampant, the environment more polluted, and shareholder profit more exponential. A lack of fulfillment in the majority of straight out of undergrad private sector career paths is what got me interested in grad school, to spend my time and effort working on a topic that's explicitly not bullshit.

Miner49er 7y ago

It's amazing this article even needs to be written. You'd think the executives pulling in these crazy salaries would be competent enough to know that paying their "team members" next to nothing is going to result in high turnover and be a bad business decision in the long run. This article frames his choice to actually pay his employees as some big discovery, but it's not. The fact is, execs already know, but they put their short-term greed over what is best for their employees, the company in the long term, and their communities.

toasterlovin 7y ago
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Lots of things persist because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. Probably what’s going on here, in my opinion.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JimBrimble35 7y ago
  I think what you are identifying as incompetence is, in fact, well-aged malice. The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is. The fact that this article's author seems to find it novel to trickle down the proceeds of the company to the bulk of it's employees is a pretty good indication of that.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    > The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is. I know you think you’re arguing against me, but what you described supports my position.
    - _1100 7y ago
      Agreed. It doesn't matter if it is hard to recognize, if you are unable to understand something then you are by definition incompetent with respect to the task or idea.

rayiner 7y ago

I wish redistribution to the very bottom was a bigger part of the political debate. Our politics is currently focused on redistribution from the very top to the middle class. (Stuff like free college or universal healthcare would primarily benefit the top half, because those folks are the ones who are in a position to be accepted to and attend college, and aren’t already covered by Medicaid.) The math of that is tough, because 70% of all income is earned by households in the 50-99% income range (between $40,000 and $480,000 household income). But the bottom 50% earns just 11% of all income, a little over $1 trillion. You could really improve their standard of living with even modest redistribution of the $9 trillion earned by the top 50% to the bottom 50%. But unfortunately middle class taxation is a complete non-starter in the US, even though that is how almost all European countries pay for their welfare states.

rtkwe 7y ago
It's also crazy to me that the whole framing is around providing money for investment when any stimulus to the end consumer is going to inevitably end up at the top (it's not like money flows many other directions in the long run in our current system).
conanbatt 7y ago
Because all politically profitable strategies at increases taxes for the rich are always about giving a benefit to the most politically powerful group: the middle class. A society where the top 90% pitches in to help the 10% in distress is very different to the one where the middle 50% takes from the top 25%, and leaves some scraps to the bottom 25%. - Milton Friedman
OliverJones 7y ago
Maybe, just maybe, the feds and the states (in the US) should pass laws like this: Employers are liable to the government for four times the cost of providing SNAP (f/k/a food stamps), public housing, and other welfare benefits to their employees. 1/3 of any fines collected in this way would be payable to citizens who report the problems. It's totally unfair for the taxpayers to subsidize businesses by feeding and housing their underpaid employees. The point of the draconian 4x charge is to make it less expensive for companies to do the right thing and quit with the starvation wages already. But legislatures work for their donors, not their citizens, so it won't happen.

Circuits 7y ago

This seems like the equivalent of a man walking up to a homeless person, kneeling and handing the man $5 while his wife takes a picture of the action... Oh! You have an ounce of humanity left in your slowly freezing heart, you want a cookie jackass? Had the top 5% cut their salaries in half and disbursed it equally to the bottom 5% then I might have been impressed but anything short of that and you aren't going to get me to bat an eye.

golergka 7y ago

And this is exactly how wage rises should work: business-driven decision without any government intervention. Good job.

brianpgordon 7y ago

> last year we broadened profit sharing to all levels of the company So... do executives think this means something to people? This incentive seems comically out-of-touch. I guess because CEOs live and breathe stock valuation-based bonuses they naturally assume that everyone gets motivated the same way. But it seems like a stretch that strains credulity to think that someone making $15/hr and getting a microscopic slice of revenue would develop a sense of motivation from the fact that their personal call-center interactions might maybe increase their share of revenue by a few pennies a week through slightly happier customers.

anon4lol 7y ago

I really hate articles like this. The company provides home health visits, requiring a nurse. Nurses don't work for $7.50 hour. Reading closely, it was for entry-level positions, probably in a certain department. Skilled positions would require market rates. Translation: in an economic down turn they killed the bonus, raised the pay for customer service reps, and are now claiming a moral victory as if the growth was caused by paying people more.

huxflux 7y ago

That's called being an startup, any other news?