Thank you very much for this, Thierry. And I share your commitment towards transparency as a core value. Congratulations on your appointment too! :-)
anirudh
On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 9:55 PM, Thierry Coudray < thierry.coudray@wikimedia.fr> wrote:
As some of you know, I've been appointed as Executive Director of Wikimedia France which is a paid position. The opportunity for me to putmy convictions into practice on wage transparency.
So for this nomination by the WMFr board, I asked that our association members to be consulted on this appointment (as the board chose one of its members and quite quickly) and the wage (53.000 €/year, gross salary). Few others big French NGO have also done that with their mains paid positions.
This allowed an interesting debate and explanations about this wage that may seem as high for most of our young members, students or who begin with difficulty their working life. But finally almost all agree with the nomination and the wage. I'm strengthened in my conviction that if you are able to explain the salary amount, you should not be afraid of transparency. And transparency also requires the board/ED to be able to justify the salary of any position and wages differentials between staff. If not, the wage is probably not what it should be.
I understand the arguments I've read but do not share it. Recruited the best person is a goal of any recruiting organization, but that should not come at the expense of our values. And transparancy is a core value of our movement.
Thierry
2012/2/7 Samat samat78@gmail.com
Thank you Sebastian! Your response was very interesting and useful for me.
Samat
On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 10:57, Sebastian Moleski < sebastian.moleski@wikimedia.de> wrote:
Please ignore my prior post. I hit send to early.
Hi Thierry,
On 03.02.2012 19:38, Thierry Coudray wrote:
In France, the practice is that the wages in charities or NGOs are generally 15 to 20% below market value. Difficult to check for small organizationsbecause in France, it's culturally not easy to
speak/disclose personal wage even if things are changing. Difficult also because some jobs in charities are very specific and sometimes do not have their equivalent in the job-market.
I can't speak much for France but I'd like to share some of the WMDE perspective. I hope it's useful to you or anyone else who is considering hiring chapter staff.
When Wikimedia Deutschland started actively recruiting employees in 2008, we had a similar discussion regarding how we want to go about setting and disclosing wages. As a preface, probably similarly to France, talking about one's own wage is somewhat taboo in Germany. While there are pay scales available for the public sector, which allow you to infer what wage range a particular position is paid, no such disclosure is typically available for the private sector, whether for- or non-profit. Exceptions are heavily unionized industries where pay scales are negotiated at a very high and broad level. What we do doesn't really fall into those though.
That being said, the most important goal for us when setting hiring practices was that we wanted to get staff that would be most effective. Effectiveness typically requires competence and motivation, the attributes that almost any other employer also looks for. With that goal in mind, there were a number of factors to consider:
- The German workforce is shrinking. Our unemployment rate has been
steadily decreasing for years and is now close to levels not seen since the 1980s. Birth rates have been rather low in Germany for decades meaning less and less people are entering the job market. At the same time, record numbers of people are retiring and immigration is close to non-existent. That means that more and more employers are competing for less and less candidates.
- The kind of work we do and the skills associated with that work are
rare to find. Many of the problems we are trying to tackle are new in the sense that nobody else before us has attempted or succeeded in them. Nobody knows, for example, how to get more people to engage in collaboratively producing an encyclopedia, text books, etc. online. Consider how many attempts WMDE, the Foundation, and others have made in trying to recruit new editors, and how few of those have succeeded. Similarly, nobody really knows how to reform a public education system to move towards utilizing free knowledge resources rather than proprietary printed works. Similarly, nobody really knows how to influence an online community to become more effective, more self-sustaining, and more self-regenerating. The "newness" of many of the challenges we are trying to tackle means we need people who are highly creative, open to take risks, and able to deal with highly complex scenarios.
- There are a number of well-funded organizations looking for the same
kind of people. Many of the problems we're trying to solve are also problems other organizations like Google, Facebook, numerous startups, and some traditional companies interested in diversifying are trying to solve. It is clear that we cannot compete on pay with many of them. That doesn't mean that we can ignore their rates because, in the end, our staff has to be able to pay rent, cover their cost of living, and lead a satisfying life just as much as theirs does.
- We are not like the public sector. People that choose to work for the
government (or quasi-governmental entities) tend to accept lower than market rates because they get other benefits such as job security, generous pension plans, and a high sense of stability in return. We can't really offer those things. Our situation is much more like a startup than a provider of public services. There's today no telling what Wikimedia Deutschland will look 2 much less 5 or 10 years from now--or if it will even exist anymore. That's very different from a public service provider like a school or some administrative agency, which probably won't change all that much in that kind of timeframe.
Taking these factors into account meant that, in general, we would have to orient ourselves more along actual market rates rather than public sector pay scales. We discount the market comparison by a "mission factor" which takes into account that we also wanted to find staff that personally identifies with our mission and wants to work for us to a large portion because of that. Trying to get the best people for each job also means that there's typically not a set pay scale for each position--rather wages and benefits are negotiated one-on-one. As a result, two project managers with different experience, qualifications, subject areas, and negotiation skills, for example, will usually not get paid the same amount.
If we had opted to go the route of "full transparency" instead, we would have severely diminished our ability to negotiate individually, significantly impairing our ability to hire the best staff. We would, in our judgment, have appeared much less attractive to candidates who might also consider working for other employers that don't publicly disclose their pay scales.
Best regards,
Sebastian Moleski President
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-- Thierry Coudray Directeur exécutif
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