At Payflip, transparent salaries are embedded in a culture of total transparency in the entire company.

We believe that employees at Payflip should have access to all information about the company. We believe that access to information will give employees the context to make the best possible decisions in their day to day jobs.

As a part of that, our salaries are transparent. This means that everyone knows (or can know) each other’s salary. We believe that this transparency will lead the company to make more fair hiring and promotion decisions.

Transparent salaries are just one piece of the Payflip culture and HR puzzle. Without our culture, without our HR processes, transparent salaries do not work.

To build our culture, we based ourselves on inspirational companies such as Charlie HR, Alan, Remote, Amazon, and Netflix. Throughout this article, you will find references to these companies.

One last disclaimer. Transparent salaries work for us. It’s our culture, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s everyone’s culture. Transparent salaries do not work in every environment, in every kind of company. But we believe that it leads to a culture that is open and fair.

So concretely, how do we tackle this? We start from our salary & level grid. Basically, we have determined 10 impact levels at the company. For each level, the salary is calculated based on the level, and the numbers of professional experience.

Basically, we have 2 important parts in the grid:

Gross salary grid

In the gross salary grid, we define a base salary for each horizontal level. These horizontal levels define the impact that a person has on their respective team or the wider company.

The vertical levels simply refer to the years of experience. The vertical levels are calculated as follows: you multiply the age parameter (2%) per year of professional experience (also years outside of Payflip). We included the indexation on experience level to account for the market development.

Easy, right? 🤷‍♂️ Below, we discuss in more detail how we decided on the exact numbers for each level. ;)

Benefit grid

Next to our salary grid, we also have a benefit grid. The list of benefits simply depends on the level, without distinction based on professional experience.

Our benefit grid is quite large. In general, the benefit grid is built to stimulate flexibility. We work as much as possible with theme-specific budgets (home office budget, education budget, remote working budget) that can be spent on benefits that employees choose themselves. Our colleague Laura wrote a great blog post on this.

So how did we ever determine these levels, and the amounts that go along with it? Well, we started from the public salary grid of Alan (no need to re-invent the wheel, right? 🛞). At Alan, the salary grid is a lot more extensive with more than 15 levels (Alan also has 800 employees more than Payflip).

We decided to keep it more straightforward, and start with 10 levels, spread over 4 broader categories (Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert). These levels are not fixed, and could be extended later on, if we hire more (expert) profiles. For now, we’ve never had difficulties with the available levels at Payflip.

The main principle we used was the following:

In the end, we believe that the names of the levels, or the exact amounts don’t necessarily matter that much. What matters - of course - is how you determine the impact of employees at each level. 😉

How do we link the levels to the performance of employees

The crux of the matter. How do we decide which employee belongs to which level?

We use the following principles:

Again, we are not the only ones doing this. To build this, we got our inspiration from Charlie HR, Remote, and Alan, amongst others. Some companies like Charlie HR and Remote, explicitly differentiate between an IC (Individual Contributor) path, and a People Management Path (see example below).

At Payflip - although we believe that this is the right way forward - we are not (yet) following this principle, but rather try to define impact on a broader level.

Example of Remote: their grid for product designers, including a manager vs IC path.

As a member of the Payflip community 💜, you have - no doubt - been in contact with one of our wonderful customer success managers. Our customer success team is a self-steering team. There are no managers. They work together to define their yearly goals (we use the OKR-framework) and they are individually - or as a team - responsible to define and achieve those objectives.

Starting from general impact.

Per level, we define in 1 sentence what it means to be in that level (specifically for the customer success (CS) team). We define this on impact level. (What is the impact of that person on the team, but also on the company in general).

Broader verticals that we assess on

Then, we define broader verticals that we assess people on to determine their level. Most themes are defined per community. There are some verticals (recruiting, coaching & mentorship & leadership principles) that are shared between communities.

In this case, for the customer success team, we defined 7 verticals:

1. Client management skills

Defining these verticals is a continuous process. And this is the hardest, but also the most valuable part of transparent salaries. When you build transparent salaries, you also need to make the decision process on those levels transparent. This forces you (as a company, as a community, as an HR-department) to deeply think about what you value as a company and as a community. (What actually is a well-performing member of the customer success team?)

When we first built our customer success levels, they looked completely different. Our customer success team also looked completely different (we were 1 person at a time, now we are 6). As the team evolves, so do the roles, the responsibilities and the impact.

Our verticals continuously evolve. On a recurring basis, they are re-assessed and adapted. The more the teams grow, the more that the levels are driven by the members of the community, and not longer by the founders.

Again, we based ourselves heavily on Charlie HR, Remote, and Alan to determine the structure of these levels.

When we started our HR framework, we wanted to avoid that the most vocal Payflip’ers are the ones that are continuously being promoted, and that our more introverted employees turn into quiet quitters. That’s why we wanted to build a fixed framework, where employees can indicate whether (and why) they believe they deserve a promotion.

Therefore, we installed a fixed, 6-month performance review system. For us, these 6 months are the perfect timeframe to:

Charlie HR, for example, organises performance reviews 3 times per year. We would recommend 2x per year.

We won’t go too much in-depth on the exact workings of our review or coaching system here. However, we have a review system where everyone is reviewed by:

All reviews are written down, and the main findings are then discussed in an oral session between the employee, their coach and the assigned peer. For each review cycle, we have clear deadlines when to complete the reviews (see overview).

At the end of each performance review, every reviewer is asked to assess the person’s position in the level grid of the community.

When both the person being reviewed AND the coach indicate that they ‘strongly think that the impact is above level’, then the promotion decision is moved to the founders, who have the final decision on the promotion. Coaches are responsible to defend the promotion decision to the founder team.

Promotions are a celebratory moment at Payflip. It’s a moment to praise people for what they are doing, and these moments are shared between the team. It’s a real cornerstone of the transparent culture that we want to foster in the company.

What do we do with indexations?

In Belgium, we have our infamous ‘automatic indexation system’. When this happens, we are forced to index our entire salary grid (with the exception of the extralegal benefit grid).

How does age evolution work exactly?

Every year that an employee is in Payflip service, they receive a 2% raise. This raise is given in the month of their Payflip anniversary.

Why do you work with an age evolution?

We work with an age evolution to account for the reality of the job market and to reward loyalty at Payflip. Without the age evolution, it would be very hard to hire employees with +10 years of experience.

As you can expect, there is no clear answer for this. It all starts from the culture you have at the company. Transparent salaries are always the last step in a process to make decision making in the company more transparent.

If - in your hiring process - you heavily negotiate with candidates on their desired salaries, if you have an ad hoc process to determine promotions, then transparent salaries are NOT the way to go.

Transparent salaries can only work if:

If you want to start out with transparent salaries, then those are 2 things you should start with.

These are the pros and cons of transparent salaries as we experience them at Payflip.

As mentioned throughout this article, we did not invent the wheel. :) There are some amazing, innovative companies that we got our inspiration from.

Some companies that we talked to, our read about: