Collaborative employee pay-setting by Open Collective

Most organizations, whether they are for-profit or nonprofit entities, are dominated by hierarchies and power is centralized in the hands of a few executives and managers. This has led to the evolution of economic systems that incentivize perpetual growth, wealth concentration, and the exploitation of land and people. A better society can be formed by cultivating organizations that value solidarity among peers, transparency, and participatory processes that give workers agency to self-direct and guide the mission and outcomes of the organizations they are part of.

The Open Collective Foundation, with support from Greaterthan, went through a participatory process with members of their organization to develop their own compensation calculation methodology. A Compensation Working Group was established with 3 rotating members to manage the process as a whole, attain feedback, and facilitate iterations of the model. During the workshop with Greaterthan, various group and individual exercises were conducted to inform the generation of the compensation model. The final output was a combined model which incorporated a formula (for establishing a baseline salary), a self-set process based on personal factors (which remains private information), and collectively-set factors (determined in dialog with the team).