Negotiation

At our studio, we automatically increase everyone’s salaries at the end of each tax year as high as we believe is being competitive with the industry we’re in whilst also maintaining security for the studio.

We believe all departments contribute equally to the titles we create. And although supply and demand dictates salary banding for various roles, we keep it consistent across departments.

We automatically raise salaries for a number of reasons.

We don’t want to create a culture where someone feels as though they need to develop negotiating skills to get paid what they’re valued. It becomes a distraction and you not only have people that want to develop those skills, you have people that may never ask. It results in a loss of focus on the work and also we’ve seen situations in other companies where 2 developers in the same role get wildly different amounts because they negotiated a higher salary when being hired.

We also want to be transparent about salary banding. Not only should everyone have a career progression plan in place, they should know what other team members get in relation to the seniority. It help put role responsibilities into context. We’ve never seen monetary issues affect this.

I’ve heard the argument made “what if someone doesn’t deserve the raise?”. Well for me, if this happens, it’s a result of bad leadership. If someone isn’t pulling their weight in the role you hired for, you either a) hired incorrectly from a cultural perspective (or even skills perspective, but this is easier to avoid) or b) you’ve not provided enough support to develop them into the role. So again, the responsibility falls on you.

We don’t want negotiation to be part of someone’s income and it’s worked for us for over 12 years now. You may not be able to change things over night, but it’s worth considering as a long term strategy so you can focus on the work, isn’t it?