Salary is touchy. It's tied up with shame on all sides: are we being underpaid? Did we overpay for someone that is unfair? Is it too late to fix it?!
Today, host Ross Kenyon monologues about the 2025 Salary Survey from the folks at CDRjobs (which you should go fill out right now!), and shares some lessons he learned about designing HR policies the hard way and from experienced colleagues.
The main lesson is: you're never designing a policy for just one case. That's just the first precedent that will determine how current and future employees try to make sense of a companys policies. Sometimes what can be fair for one can be unfair to many, and vice versa. Wisdom is knowing the difference, and wisdom unfortunately isn't neatly fit upon a bumper sticker.
Anyways, get ready for a thinking show with some anecdotes and a clear call to action!
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Before we begin, I’d like to share a few words from our sponsor, Arbonics. Thank you, Arbonics, for sponsoring Reversing Climate Change. You helped make this show possible. I’m so grateful to you, and you deserve it. I don’t like... If you don’t know about them, they’re doing amazing forestry projects in the Baltic States in Europe. Europe has over 14 million hectares of underused land. A lot of it’s abandoned or low quality. Not a lot is happening on it. It used to be forested. But it was cleared for farming as farming intensified.
And then a lot of that farmland was later abandoned as the global food system moved towards lower cost producers. The land just wasn’t worth tending and certainly not tending in a way that we would respect as regenerative and carbon sequestering process. It was just underutilized, maybe unloved. Bronix uses technology to help landowners even find this land. And once they do have it, how to restore it back into carbon-removing biodiverse forests. If you care about carbon being removed and you want to see Europe return to the forested continent that it once was, you should be looking at urbanics.
Go talk to them. I had Lizette Luik, their founder on the podcast. The link is in the We talk about a lot of the tricky issues that surround durability and carbon removal and how does forestry fit in. It’s a very thoughtful episode. I really liked talking to her. It made it really easy to pitch Arbonics on doing some business together because I want to see their work be Thank you again Arbonics. The link to check out Arbonics’ website is in the show notes. You should listen to the show if you haven’t heard it already that I do with Lizette.
It will teach you quite a lot about how they think and what they’re doing and now we will feed back in to the rest of the show. Thank you for listening. Here it is. Hey, thanks for listening. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the host of the Reversing Climate Change podcast and a longtime carbon removal entrepreneur. Today is a monologue show, and it’s a monologue in support of the 2025 CDR Salary Survey put out by the folks at CDR Jobs. If you listen to this podcast, I suspect there is a preponderance likelihood that you have been on CDRjobs.
Earth looking for positions. It is the main place where carbon removal jobs are listed. And they use their position within our industry to get access to data around HR matters and most prominently around compensation. Pay is distributed at companies opens up a number of questions that if you are in the position of starting your own company or in a position of leadership, you will soon have to face. I’ll get into all of that. Before I do, If you work in carbon removal, my ask to you is that you will please go and fill out the 2025 salary survey so that the folks at CDR jobs can get more access to data around compensation so that they can put out analysis that can make sure that people are being fairly compensated and that more information is shared.
We aim to be a transparent industry. And this is one of those cases where more information is certainly better to have. The link is in the show notes. Pull it up right now while you’re listening, take a look, fill it out, help them get more data this year. 2025 is of course a very important year for carbon removal for us to be moving and developing and this information will be very valuable. So if you’re listening, if you could please do that, it’s anonymous and it helps us develop. I’d like to share some about why I care about this and also what it’s like being at a company that has to make decisions about HR matters, human resources matters, and also about compensation.
Typically, if you haven’t been in leadership or started a company, and there’s some overlap between those categories, being an employee, unless you are wildly empathetic, To the position of your company, your goal is to get as much for yourself as possible and presumably also your friends. You’d like to see them well compensated, happy, feeling wealthy, things of that nature. And it feels very unipolar in that way. When you are in leadership at a company, the way that I usually put it is, When you’re a kid, you don’t really understand the reasons why authority figures do things.
Much of it feels arbitrary, capricious, unnecessary. And there’s a lot of that in there for sure. It’d be hard for me to deny. I’m sure there’s people you look back on from your childhood and just know that something was really wrong with this person and the way that they enacted authority over young people. But I suspect there are also many cases where as you become an adult, as you’ve been promoted at work, as you become a parent, that many of the rules have a logic to them that makes sense, that may be invisible or illegible to those without this experience.
But as the experience becomes acquired by you, the logic becomes apparent. And anything at a company, once it grows beyond a couple founders, there’s a sort of casuistic logic to it. By which I mean cases will be brought to you as the leadership team, as a manager, as someone responsible for the company of having to decide. And it’s one of those things where it can be, how should PTO be used? Does that roll over year over year? Can people combine it? Can people save up a lot of it and take two months in a row off?
That’s just the first example that I even thought of. The way to make a decision around an HR matter is not about what is immediately fair to this person. The tendency is to want to be extremely generous and almost familial in these cases where you want to help this person out, especially if you’re a small company. When you start, it feels like family and it feels... Wrong to have very strict rules of employment policies. But the correct way to make decisions for HR matters is to know that whatever precedent you set will be cited in the future against you in a number of cases when people bring matters to you to decide.
If you decide that people are entitled to rack up as much PTO as they want and they can use it in any manner that they choose, then... You know, two years from now, you will have someone who has months stacked up and they’re going to take it. And then also they’re going to take parental leave right after it and will effectively be gone for a year or something like that. And being so generous in this way, it’s probably not fair to the company to have to stack up that loss of experience all co-located at the same time.
And it’s likely not fair to their colleagues who have to make it work while this person is gone. I’ve seen this go the other direction too, where maybe a company started with a strong ethos of co-location Everyone is at the office together or is mostly in the office. Maybe it’s two or three days where you’re expected to be there. And then someone who is deemed too important to lose says that they need to move somewhere else and that it’s take it or leave it. And the company could decide, well, we really need this person for such and such reason.
We can’t let them go. So we’re going to allow this person to relocate and no longer be co-located with the office. Guess what happens after that? People notice it. They also face pressure to live elsewhere. Maybe they need to move because a parent is sick or something like that. They need to be around to give more care. And so it’s a very sympathetic reason to offer this to them. But you just know that even if in this specific case, it is a generous interpretation of the rules and kind to this person, overall, it will feel unkind to everyone else because you will be unable to offer them something similar without a great reason.
And it feels bad. There are so many versions of this too. I’m sure you can dream up some scenarios and I’m sure you’ve seen many of them where you felt like a decision went the wrong direction and was either too understanding or too inflexible. And it likely depends upon where you’re standing in relation to the decision because that can now, you know, motivated reasoning is real. And so always knowing yourself and what’s happening inside of you is very important. But I’ve also seen some cases where the right line, especially as pertains to compensation, were relatively well handled.
And I’ll give you an example here. One of the things I really liked about Nori’s hiring policies that I learned a lot from was that we hired based upon a banded pay range that was public. So we use software to determine at certain levels of experience in certain roles within the Seattle market, how much compensation there was. And the reason for doing this was that negotiation is the area through which much inequality and compensation is enacted. Because the people who feel that they have more options and are more willing to walk away, they’re willing to stick their neck out a little bit further and willing to ask for it.
Whenever the stats come out on this, it’s always that women and people of color tend to be less successful in that negotiation moment for various reasons. I have a close friend who grew up poor and works at a place that has almost like a seniority aspect to their pay. In the sense that every year, every three years, you are on track to go up a level and that level comes with a 12% pay raise or something like that. But it’s all predicated upon the first salary that you take. So because my friend felt uncomfortable negotiating out the gate and was so grateful to have a job at this company, He is just being left behind where he has coworkers who earn a decent chunk more, like a non-negligible amount more for the same work.
And it’s all because either he didn’t have the experience or comfort to negotiate in this kind of environment. You can go back sociologically and say it’s because he’s a person of color. He grew up poor. Some combination of those things. Obviously, they’re often linked in the United States. It just seems unfair. And one of the things that has felt unfair about compensation is that people are often scared to talk about it. It’s one of those things where if you go out to a happy hour and you’re hanging with people and they all work at a company and they might start talking about how much they bring home.
I think it’s likely to lead to bad feelings from at least someone coming home that night because someone negotiated a better deal for themselves for the same amount of work. And it can often feel pretty crummy because it doesn’t necessarily depend as much upon skill or experience. Sometimes it depends upon how confident you are, how gifted of an order you are at the right moment. One of the things that we tried to do was to limit the ability for negotiation to influence pay. The downside of that is that we often lost candidates who were used to advocating for themselves and getting better deals.
So sometimes they would look at this and say, like, why would I just take the offer? I’m used to getting an offer and then going back and forth five rounds until I get all the PTO and all the salary and feel like I maxed out my possibilities at a company. And that wasn’t what we wanted to do. We decided that culturally it was more fair to say what we thought that this job was worth in the market in which we were operating and put it out there that way. And I felt that led to less bruised feelings than otherwise.
Maybe there was some disappointment on the front end that one couldn’t talk oneself into a greater amount of pay. But the hope was that over time, culturally, this would create more trust that some people were not being paid less, or at least that there was a Empirical justification for the amount that could be pointed to such that it was algorithmic. It reduced the personal influence of the applicant for the job and it reduced the influence of those that might be able to, at another company, customize the package that would be offered to the applicant once they were offered a position.
I am not sure that this is the correct way to go in all cases. There are tradeoffs with this. In fact, I even phrase this in terms of tradeoffs because we likely lost candidates on the front end who were disappointed by the static pay bans and receiving an offer without the possibility of negotiation. Like anything in life, there are tradeoffs that must be considered, and that is certainly one. But I did respect that we were willing to work in a place where if salary information is Was revealed to everyone who worked at a company because those stories do exist.
You know, someone sends out the compensation spreadsheet and someone gets their mitts on it and then like, oh my gosh, that person makes that amount. I’ve seen the quality of their work. There’s no way they deserve that. How did that happen? It was nice to know that the risk of that was less than it probably is at other companies. There’s likely still going to be some of that so long as humans are, I don’t know, status oriented, somewhat competitive or fully competitive agents upon the planet. And there are certainly cases where someone might have skills that were unrepresented within the type of pay banding.
Algorithmic salary setting that we were doing that might find it harder to be fairly compensated. There probably were cases where that would happen. How could it not? Because it’s software, have some goofs like that built in. But I did like that it was one of those principles that was conservative in a good way, where if challenged on it, there’s less room for flexibility, but that lack of flexibility potentially makes it more fair. If you’ve been in this process before, if you’ve been on a leadership team that has responsibility for company policies, I suspect you’ve already learned this lesson that some degree of inflexibility Solves its own problems.
Learning the lesson that a company is not a family takes some time of learning. And I feel I’ve had to learn that one several times. But when I do coach companies, that is something that I often have to point out, especially to first-time founders, is to learn this lesson. Because there are a number of cases where I could think of several off the top of my head where I think I made my desire to be more flexible, generous, familial in a way, ended up being potentially less kind than something a bit more formal, a bit more distanced, that counterintuitively that one can only learn from experience is actually the kind way to run a company.
And for that reason, I think initiatives like this are really important. I think publishing Accurate pay bands or even just salaries for positions is really valuable. I think when I’m out applying for positions and there’s no salary listed, I just imagine that it’s going to be disappointing or I’m going to invest time into doing a cover letter and making this happen only to be lowballed. I would feel bad if I worked at a company that paid a woman less than a man for the same job or focused so heavily on oratorical ability.
And negotiation skill that those more able to take a riskier route of negotiation might end up with a better pay packet than someone else. I think that kind of personal influence should be minimized. I think in cases like this. We should run companies that err on the side of if this were to be revealed, how would we feel about it? I’ve heard it called something like the front page test or the mother test. Like if your mom found out that this was the policy at your company or that your comments ended up on the front page of the New York Times, how would you feel about it?
And I think issues around compensation absolutely are like this. It’s one of those areas that feels so secretive. Because there’s some aspect of shame tied up in it. We either let someone get us over a barrel and we overpaid for someone’s services, or we underpaid someone that could have asked for more but was too scared or unskilled to do. I think in those cases, it makes more sense to go towards revealing how this is working. If you’re listening and you’re an employee, You also should probably be talking to your colleagues about how much you make.
That’s one of those cases where it could potentially give you a better edge on negotiation when you are up for a raise or even if you need to go fix it now that you’re being underpaid. Knowing what your colleagues make and being transparent about that, I think, is an important thing. Or you might find out that one of your colleagues who was less successful as you at negotiating for their pay packet is being underpaid by your estimate and maybe you’re able to use your influence to help them. If you’re an employer or on leadership and you’re listening, I think this is a good chance to redesign your HR policies such that they would feel fair if they were revealed.
You should plan that your employees are going to talk about their pay at some point or there’s going to be a mistake and that information will get out against your will. And you want to be able to stand behind it and feel that it’s publicly justifiable. And I think leadership efforts like this from CDR jobs is important because it gets us to talk about this topic around which there’s a lot of shame and secrecy. I don’t think running companies this way is in the long-term interests of the people doing it.
I think there are better ways to design human resource policies such that problems like this are avoided. And also if you maybe went down the wrong path through inexperience or some other reason, it’s also not too late to start fixing this. I think it’s good to be honest about these matters and to design systems that would feel good if the whole company or your industry knew about them. And pay is certainly one of these areas. It’s good for meritocracy. It’s good for inequality. It’s good for creating cultures of trust where people want to work and want to stay.
And for that reason, I think you should go and fill out the 2025 CDR jobs salary survey. It’s linked in the show notes. I really want to make sure they get even more than they got last year. So there’s a 2024 CDR salary report that you can go read. The link is also in the show notes. You should. There’s a lot of great information in there. As always, I wish I could come down with the general principle here. I think being conservative tends to be the more fair way to go when designing policies that will set precedent for HR purposes.
But I’m sure you can think of some examples where the general rule is actually less fair. So like so many of these shows... Wisdom comes from the experience of applying these rules probably incorrectly and learning from that experience. And the wisdom is in knowing when to apply which version of the rule, when to be strict and when to be forgiving. There’s so much more to say about it. It’s a surprisingly fascinating part of running a company. In any case, thank you for listening. The links are in the show notes. A great rating and review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts that has a rating function would be greatly appreciated.
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