Quantum's new minimum wage
At Quantum, we recently raised our minimum wage from $14.82/hour to over $17.30/hour. I’ve been asked to explain why we did this and what our reasoning is.
We’ve grown in the last year and hired several people to keep up. The new folks loved our culture and camaraderie but could not make ends meet on our “Quantum minimum”; some actually took second jobs as they gained the experience and knowledge needed to increase their wage at Quantum. Several of our veteran employees started asking questions about our compensation system and whether the base pay was adequate. These questions started some healthy dialogue within our walls – really cool stuff.
We started at the basics. We are big fans of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs here at Quantum and teach the model in several of our classes.
We expect people to work and operate at least in the 3rd rung. Ideally, we want people to be in the 4th rung and ultimately get to the 5th rung. But, if people were struggling to make ends meets, if their basic physiological needs were not secure, should we/could we truly have this expectation? Safety needed to come first, BEFORE we could get to the higher levels.
We started on a journey of discovery. How much does it take to live in our area? We all knew housing is expensive in the Rogue Valley and there are virtually no rental properties. But how much did it actually cost?
After some research, we quickly came to realize that we were quite a ways off with our base pay. In order to get our people to be able to afford food, clothing, housing, insurance, a car payment and have a small savings or investment, we needed to be closer to $36,000/year in our area.
We ran the numbers and calculated the changes and got the whole company together to announce the new base salary. Were there a lot of happy people? You bet. But you know the best part? The pride of the employees whose salaries didn't increase but were simply proud to work for a company that cared enough to do something like that.
It was the right thing to do and we did it. Simple. A reinforcement of who we say we are. A reinforcement that we care and value those that are in the same boat with us.
Real Estate Agent at eXp Realty
5 年Wow! That’s really awesome Norman! It is great that more businesses in the Valley are taking into consideration a healthy starting pay. I am sure your employees are much more productive at work because they don’t have as high of financial stress weighing them down. It’s a great approach for both the employees and the business!