When we hired AVT and started the project in February, it had a pretty wide scope and the market situation was wildly different to what it is today. After the project was initiated, our price climbed rapidly. As it did so, certain aspects of the project were discontinued as they were no longer valuable. In particular, because the funds freed up to enable full market rate salaries, we no longer required an interim transition plan. Instead, it became more critical to ensure accuracy of the market rates we were assigning to individuals, so that we could make the transition as quickly as possible.
Market rates have had tremendous benefit to our organization already. It has allowed us to attract a large number of highly talented individuals to the project, and enabled more hours from team members already contributing part-time. It has also made participation from our long-time contributors sustainable on an ongoing basis. We believe this additional capacity and stability will deliver long-term value to the project.
We defined six areas of work, but with different priorities because our agreement with AVT only gave us a limited number of hours and we didn't know yet how long each part was going to take:
1. Recruiting
2. Role definition
3. Compensation
4. On-boarding
5. Performance evaluation
6. Firing
In relation with compensation, the main priority was to design and manage the transition to market salaries for the Core Team members, but back then we could only afford to partially move in that direction.
During this time AVT prepared an extensive questionnaire that was passed to all team members to fully understand the roles and relations within the team.
With that information, AVT did a lot of research to determine what the market salaries were for the positions in the team. This analysis was only done for full time team members because they do most of the work and part timers are too diverse to include in such a study. The compensation analysis had to consider not only the profiles and roles, but also geographic location, which made it extra difficult. At all times there was a lot of communication between AVT and the Dash team so we were sure that all the hypotheses made sense in our particular circumstances.
Besides the work on compensation, AVT has also done some work on all other areas of the initial scope of the project and has also assisted us on a couple detours related to other projects and HR. Donna White and the rest of AVT team dedication has been more than what we initially agreed and for that we are grateful. As a different project, they are helping us with some of the recruitment we are doing at the moment,, and have provided sample processes, documents, and guidelines to help jumpstart our incoming Head of HR.
Given all of the benefits of the project and the modest cost, we are extremely pleased with the outcome.
Edit: added some input from @babygiraffe
Market rates have had tremendous benefit to our organization already. It has allowed us to attract a large number of highly talented individuals to the project, and enabled more hours from team members already contributing part-time. It has also made participation from our long-time contributors sustainable on an ongoing basis. We believe this additional capacity and stability will deliver long-term value to the project.
We defined six areas of work, but with different priorities because our agreement with AVT only gave us a limited number of hours and we didn't know yet how long each part was going to take:
1. Recruiting
2. Role definition
3. Compensation
4. On-boarding
5. Performance evaluation
6. Firing
In relation with compensation, the main priority was to design and manage the transition to market salaries for the Core Team members, but back then we could only afford to partially move in that direction.
During this time AVT prepared an extensive questionnaire that was passed to all team members to fully understand the roles and relations within the team.
With that information, AVT did a lot of research to determine what the market salaries were for the positions in the team. This analysis was only done for full time team members because they do most of the work and part timers are too diverse to include in such a study. The compensation analysis had to consider not only the profiles and roles, but also geographic location, which made it extra difficult. At all times there was a lot of communication between AVT and the Dash team so we were sure that all the hypotheses made sense in our particular circumstances.
Besides the work on compensation, AVT has also done some work on all other areas of the initial scope of the project and has also assisted us on a couple detours related to other projects and HR. Donna White and the rest of AVT team dedication has been more than what we initially agreed and for that we are grateful. As a different project, they are helping us with some of the recruitment we are doing at the moment,, and have provided sample processes, documents, and guidelines to help jumpstart our incoming Head of HR.
Given all of the benefits of the project and the modest cost, we are extremely pleased with the outcome.
Edit: added some input from @babygiraffe
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