<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Civic Square was founded as Impact Hub Birmingham in 2014, it began by paying everyone Real Living Wage. By 2020, Civic Square needed to attract people who wouldn’t necessarily join for a lower wage, but needed to work out how to value people, their work, and how they could use pay to establish expectations they put on the organisation, and the organisation put on them.
In 2021 Civic Square introduced its new pay formula, seeking to pay each team member enough to bring the best that they can bring. We spoke with Andy Reeve about their pay journey, below are some excerpts from that conversation.
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A diagram showing the pay journey of Civic Square.
Real Living Wage has always been their benchmark, and everyone knew there was pay parity across the organisation. Even though they couldn’t really afford to pay anyone more, they didn't want to pay anyone less either. Annual pay rises were always aligned to Living Wage.
When Civic Square committed to developing their own pay formula, Andy started researching various approaches that factored in various living costs. He found out that the methodology and research behind living wage was fairly robust, and that plenty of academic work had already gone into developing living wage.
<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> Influence: University of York Living Wage
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Living Wage remains the foundation of Civic Squares pay formula.
During the process of revision, they focused on ways to enhance the living wage towards a thriving wage. The current iteration of which involves the following components.
There are five levels of banding
<aside> <img src="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/light-bulb_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> Influence: Mondragon Co-operatives in Basque Country
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“We used to have a flat structure. But we never had flat responsibility.”
Responsibilities could be legal and formally codified or less visible stresses and strains, the responsibility multiplier seeks to table both, and inspire people to think about/hold responsibility.
“It's having that more open responsibility chatter, like, what responsibility are you holding? And do you want more? Or have you got too much? Or are you actually holding the responsibility that we expect of you as well. So it's kind of making that quite front and centre to say that this is part of the game.”