Equity, High-trust leadership, Sharing
Beyond fair pay and generous benefits, employees expect to have equal participation and access to all outcomes of a company鈥檚 success.
When looking at 鈥渟haring鈥� 鈥� one of the nine high-trust leadership behaviors that strengthens workplace culture 鈥� most leaders focus on pay.
However, just crunching the numbers doesn鈥檛 capture an important driver of trust in organizations: employees鈥� perception of fairness. You might pay everyone the same, and some employees will still feel underpaid for their efforts.
鈥淓quity does not equal sameness,鈥� says Michael C. Bush, CEO of 逸遊娛樂城庐. What really matters is ensuring that every employee, regardless of role, feels like they share in a company鈥檚 success.
That means clearly communicating about performance, incentive structure, and career opportunities, Bush says. 鈥淢ake sure you鈥檙e truly inclusive in terms of sharing opportunities for people, as well as the resources of the organization.鈥�
The best workplaces also think broadly about what people value as a reward for their work at a company. Financial compensation is one example, but employees also value the ability to give back to their community and opportunities for development and career advancement.
If your company rewards employees with a year-end holiday bash to celebrate a successful year, how do you ensure all employees can attend?
How leaders can improve
Here鈥檚 how companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For庐 List are building cultures that prioritize fairness and build trust:
1. Start with fair pay
Great workplaces carefully review their salary ranges, bonus plans, and total compensation programs to ensure pay is fair, and revisit their analysis regularly.
At NuStar Energy, every employee receives an annual bonus, regardless of what role they play at the company. If the CEO gets a bonus, everyone at the company is getting a bonus.
The company also boasts an unusually low CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 50 to 1, meaning that the CEO only earns 50 times the average annual salary of other employees. The gap is dramatically smaller than the average for the S&P 500, where CEOs typically earn 272 times more than workers at their company.
Great workplaces also consider employee feedback on compensation. When employees can voice concerns, they have more confidence in the compensation process and are more likely to trust that leaders consider their needs when making decisions about pay.
At Ryan LLC, a plan to adjust compensation for remote team members based on their geographic location rankled some team members, who argued the proposal created disparities within a team鈥檚 compensation bans.
Ryan leaders listened, and six months after rolling out a plan for remote worker compensation, made adjustments. Compensation is now based on the geographic region for a team鈥檚 assigned office location, rather than an individual worker鈥檚 location, ensuring fair compensation for work by members of the same team.
Great workplaces also analyze compensation across gender, racial background, job type, and more 鈥� and make adjustments when necessary. Salesforce , leaders saw that offering an employee stock purchase program , employees and managers receive training on how to set goals. Employees learn how to define goals that are relevant for their role and contribute to career growth. Managers learn how to embed conversations around goals into the review process and provide continuous coaching to those who report them.
4. Ensure every employee has an opportunity to develop, grow, and advance
Pay and benefits are just some of the rewards employees look for when considering a job. Opportunities to learn or build a career are extremely valuable, and great workplaces go the extra mile to help every employee have an opportunity to grow.
DHL Express uses a career marketplace, powered by artificial intelligence, to match employees with learning opportunities within the company. Inspired by LinkedIn, the platform suggests open positions aligned with the career goals employees add to their profile.
Hilton and Cadence have invested heavily in mentorship tools to pair employees with mentors inside the organization. Hilton also provides employes with virtual coaching via BetterHelp.
Great workplaces make sure that every employee, regardless of role, can develop their career. At Walmart, 75% of salaried managers in U.S. stores, clubs, and supply chain facilities started in hourly roles. The company also offers frontline workers the opportunity to train with its 鈥淎ssociate to Driver鈥� program, which helps them to earn a commercial driver鈥檚 license and a position as a truck driver for the retailer, which can pay up to $110,000 in their first year on the job.
5. Be transparent so every employee can have the information needed to be a strategic partner
How is information shared throughout the organization? Do frontline employees feel like they have the knowledge to participate as a full participant in the business?
Hilcorp Energy Company stands out in how much transparency it offers employees about the inner workings of the business.
鈥淲e give every employee access to the company鈥檚 financials, share our measures of business success, and we teach them how to understand them,鈥� says Mike Brezina, senior vice president, human resources at Hilcorp. 鈥淲e open the books and share our financial measures such as cash flow, margin, production rate, lifting costs, investments, oil and gas price impacts, storage costs, and more.鈥�
Hilcorp is particularly proud of its flat organizational structure, embodied by its 鈥渇ive-layer strategy鈥� that limits the number of managerial levels between an individual contributor and the CEO of the company. What makes the biggest difference is the trust that Hilcorp leaders show to their workforce, trusting their team members to act like owners of the business.
鈥淲hether through identifying projects, developing a budget, or setting goals, the decisions and actions of each teams鈥� plans starts from the bottom-up,鈥� Brezina says. 鈥淒ecisions are then rolled up into the company-wide annual goals that are shared at every lifting cost meeting.鈥�
6. Consider other perks that employees value as part of their employment
Work offers more rewards than just money. Many employees value how working for a great company enables them to be involved and give back to their community.
Great workplaces are thinking about how to make sure that these ancillary benefits are also equitably shared across their workforce.
At Cisco, every year since 2020 has seen more than 80% of employees participate in volunteering and charitable giving. To achieve this remarkable result, Cisco points to a few strategies:
- It provides new hires with donation credits upon joining the organization, ensuring they can immediately engage and build the habit of giving back.
- It launched a platform called 鈥淭he Community Impact Portal,鈥� which easily connects employees with opportunities to volunteer and give, and tracks participation across the organization.
Great workplaces are always asking about which group of employees might be left behind, or how to increase full participation in the benefits of being associated with the company. When employees feel like they are respected as an equal and valuable member of the team, they give more effort, and are more likely to stay in their role.
