Stories from a Middle Manager: How to Introduce Self-Set Salaries To Your Team

Is it possible to have employees in a company determine their own pay rate?

I managed operations for several large gym companies for almost 20 years.?These were pyramid-type organizations with strong command and control systems. Like in most companies, the last one I worked for stressed to employees that no one was allowed to discuss their pay. Employees were disciplined and sometimes terminated for sharing this information.

Be transparent

Despite this mandate, I believed in transparency with open communication, especially when trying to build a culture of trust with my team. For this reason, I sought to be as upfront as possible regarding wages.

Since most of the starting pay was minimum, this topic was easy enough to communicate to all new employees.

With my lead team, I went over what the market rates/average rates were in the fitness industry for their different positions, what our payroll budget was, and how employee wages were calculated.

The concept of self-set salaries has always intrigued me, and I wanted to see how I could apply this with my team.

Decipher the basics of payroll

Payroll budgets were mainly set based on location traffic and revenue.

Most operations teams consisted of one assistant operations manager and the rest were front desk, facilities/janitorial. The location had the amenities, there were also kids’ clubs and juice bar employees.

Because I believed that a team that felt supported would be happier, more confident, and in turn complete their responsibilities with better energy and efficiency, I created a ‘lead team’ which consisted of two assistants and eight more leads.

The intent was to provide my operations team with someone they felt comfortable and confident going to with questions at all hours of the day, so these leads were spread out and covered even the overnight hours.

This also meant that from a customer service perspective, there was always a ‘manager’ on duty if they needed any additional help that the front-line team was not able to assist completely with.

The big question became my payroll.

With that many leads, their hourly rate was slightly higher than most of the operations team. I created a scheduling template, a simple spreadsheet where I could enter each individual’s hourly rates and individual hours. It would then automatically calculate an estimated total hours and total pay for the week and month.

Since I was not able to put everyone on a set salary, and hourly rates were for the most part controlled by the company, I had to get creative in adapting the self-set salary concept.

Most of the operations team were at minimum wage, which was normal in the fitness industry.

Let the team decide

I communicated to my lead team what the hourly range was in our industry, and let them know that most other teams normally did not have the number of leads that we did. I took time to go over our payroll budget and how hours and pay were calculated and applied.

Read the full article?HERE.

About the author:? Wade Okinaka ?is a Certified Semco Style Expert that transformed the company culture in his unit at a large global gym company using the principles and practices of Ricardo Semler.