Focus on new compensation tools

Speakers :

• Bertrand Altmayer, Co-founder of Cityscoot
• Vincent Bryant, Co-founder of Deepki
• Delphine Groll, Co-founder of Nabla
• Virgil Raingeard, Co-founder of Figures
• Guillaume Vitrich, Partner White & Case

Issue

• Define a coherent and transparent salary policy, to develop a talent retention policy

Key ideas

• Transparency on salaries is gradually developing as legislative changes take place in the United States and Europe, with bills pushing companies to post their salary grids on their job offers;
• Transparency is increasingly requested by employees;
• Out of 300-400 companies surveyed by Figures, 30% are transparent about their salary grids internally, 11% about individual salaries;
• Transparency is not a question, but a prerequisite; it is simply necessary to define the conditions of execution in order to make this principle realistic;
• Beyond the salary, recognition, the sense of work and all the other benefits count;
• Employees are still largely unaware of the BSPCE system and remain quite suspicious on the subject.

Points of attention or don's

• Transparency on remuneration components requires well-defined rules (seniority, age, performance) so that differences are understood;
• Transparency can be a source of tension when there are large wage differences within the company;
• Transparency is not the absolute Holy Grail: some employees do not want individual salaries to be known to everyone;
• Transparency must be used primarily as a management tool: there must be enough differences to make employees want to evolve, without these differences being disproportionate and becoming unacceptable;
• Excessive expectations should not be raised with BSPCEs;
• It is dangerous to simplify the mechanism to the extreme by guaranteeing employees that they will receive money, because some will then consider it as due;
• BSPCEs remain very difficult to promote to employees;
• The system can even become counterproductive in the event of a market downturn: we must not lose good people who would be disappointed by the fall in valuation;
• beware of secondary sales platforms that sometimes engage in wild selling and bring in foreign investors into the company;
• The resale cannot take place without the agreement of the founders and investors.

Key learnings or do's

• Transparency is the heart of the reactor: to retain teams over the long term, you must be honest about the company's vision, its strategy, the aspects that are doing well and those that are not doing well;
• Transparency on salaries generates trust and prevents clientelism;
• Even without transparency, objective criteria must be defined in order to be able to justify decisions taken; coherence must be ensured before transparency;
• For salary changes, an objective process must be established to facilitate acceptance;
• The establishment of BSPCEs must be accompanied by strong communication and total transparency on the financial situation of the company;
• Three adjustment variables can be used to make BSPCEs more “employe-friendly”: the extension of working conditions, the relaxation of the definitions of “bad leaver”, the introduction of a discount;
• Free action plans are a good management tool: like BSPCEs, they are subject to a regime set by the tax authorities and only a small part constitutes the salary.

Delphine GROLL: “Employees expect a process that allows them to identify the steps they need to take to earn a salary. This process must be regular (more than once a year) and objective (through peer evaluation). Therefore, the percentage increase is accepted more easily.”

Guillaume VITRICH: “With regard to BSPCEs, we are often very surprised at the level of misunderstanding or misunderstanding on these tools, which are quite common. We organized Zoom meetings for our customers with a group of beneficiaries for a small simplified presentation with bad case, medium case and best case and examples of equivalent values, as well as a small tax point.”

Vincent BRYANT: “The CSE has developed a guide on BSPCEs and became the first promoter. The explanation is better disseminated as well as when the Management does it.”
“We allow employees who have spent their entire envelope to sell part of their BSPCE. In the future, we want to offer breathing clauses, with the possibility of taking out a quarter of their envelope every two years, for example, with the company buying back the shares from the employees concerned.”

Bertrand ALTMAYER: “We have set up stock exchanges between shareholders every year to offer them a breathing clause. “We must always align the social interest of the company, the interests of employees and the interests of management.”

Virgile RAINGARD: “Even if you're not transparent from the start, act like you're going to be transparent tomorrow. It is a form of responsibility to potentially have to justify your compensation decisions. Even though you will never be transparent, you will have found objective criteria to justify your decisions.”

‍