Payroll is damn complex (in a remote team), I share our fair calculator

Hey IndieHackers,

We're a small team of 35, operating in 21 countries.

With all specific administrative rules and tax systems, social contribution schemes and retirement benefits, it's f***** complex.

So our 1-person admin team EITHER has to manage payroll in 21 different ways OR create a blanket salary system for all.

We chose the former and I share with you our fair salary model → https://slite.com/salary (link to the spreadsheet)

Few explanations about how it works, hope this can help you with your team too.

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People levels - the base salary
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We assess the base salary on 3 criteria: impact, of ownership and key attributes. We discuss their combination during Performance Reviews.
Employee levels are the same company-wide, regardless of team.
There's no specific incentive for managing people over being an exceptional contributor
→ Here's our simplified Employee Levels Grid you can use (https://sliteuniverse.slite.com/p/channel/3Vie58qRbjcbfW8pGxx9nb/notes/qVBbp36KgO9SKh)

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Roles - index to remain competitive
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We purchased and adapted data from 2 providers specialized in tech & remote salaries (Optionimpact and Culpepper).
We aim at staying competitive on each market.

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Location costs - index #1 for fairness
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There's a wild difference in cost of living between all countries and we want our people to work from where they want, not creating financial constraints.
We use an index to adjust pay in each location.

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Hiring setups/status - index #2 for fairness
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Because we don't have legal entities in all countries, we hire people in 3 different setups (depending on available options): employees, employees on record or contractors.
We use a setup index to give extra compensation to setups that need to manage and pay taxes/social security/retirement by themselves.

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We pay everyone in their local currency
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Our main index is Euro
We use the average exchange rate of the past 4 years to avoid extreme lows or highs.

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Edge case: executive levels & founders
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They have been excluded from the calculator and pay is benchmarked upon offer
They account for 5.7% of our team.

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Final words
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Our approach to fairness remains subjective, but it's certainly better than paying everyone the same. Plus, you'll get our internal data to help fit it to your own standards.

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I'm curious about your thoughts, so please share. We're eager to improve, and can also provide more detail answers if needed.

Have a great end of your day!

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Thanks for reading. Building this model and testing it with our team took us 1 year of work. If you enjoyed it please, it's only 10 seconds to support us! https://twitter.com/clementrog/status/1493216536626176003?s=20&t=kompOmUs8BD-Ffu5LJQKsg