Dear Gayle,
Thank you for forwarding me the Employee Engagement report slides
which I've referred to in my questions for your upcoming office hour.
I didn't realize that attribution was preventing you from distributing
them, so I made some fair use excerpts at:
http://imgur.com/a/XaY2K --
those are for my questions (3) and (4) at
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123400.html
I am trying to get Dan Pink to join in the office hour. It was made
clear from Sue's office hour yesterday that she as well as Erik rely
on an interpretation of Dan's work which is opposed by all of the most
recent secondary sources (see
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-January/123422.html)
and which Dan himself disclaims at
http://www.danpink.com/2010/01/raises-do-matter -- in particular:
"if an organization doesn’t pay someone 'an adequate amount, or if her
pay isn’t equitable compared to others doing similar work—that
person’s motivation will crater,'" and, "...Providing an employee a
high level of base pay does more to boost performance and
organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure."
I also want to share my current results for my informal donor survey
at
http://tinyurl.com/wikidonors -- currently "The Foundation should
meet or exceed Silicon Valley competitive pay to attract and retain
the best talent while competing with firms able to offer equity
participation" is agreed or strongly agreed to by 32 of 37
respondents. All of the respondents were obtained by asking people on
popular Freenode channels to voluntarily take the survey. On one hand,
that self-selected group is likely to be more in favor of free
software than the typical donor, but they may also be more frugal. So
I want to urge the Foundation to perform their own survey on this
question. You should be able to get statistically significant results
by asking less than 100 randomly selected donors, depending on their
response rate.
Finally, I also want to ask that you perform a follow-up truly
anonymous survey about Foundation employee satisfaction with pay. I
hope you will also ask whether Foundation employees believe there is a
culture where austere pay is considered a badge of honor, and whether
they feel peer pressure to avoid speaking out on the topic. You can
use e.g.
surveymonkey.com in a way which is far more anonymous than
the detailed demographics in the Ascent Advisor survey allowed. Since
it's only 25 minutes to office hours I better send this now and send
more information on how to do that later.
Best regards,
James Salsman