The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Operationalising equitable compensation through principles of fairness and transparency. Kim Kucinskas and Ishbel McWha-Hermann interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 37

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In this week’s episode, we speak to Kim Kucinskas and Dr. Ishbel McWha-Hermann about equity in compensation and fair reward in international development organisations. We talk about the Equitable Compensation Playbook, which organisations can use as a benchmark to reflect on their approaches to compensation, as well as Project Fair.

Kim and Ishbel tell us about equitable compensation as being rooted in challenging Western ideologies around pay. The discourse around decolonisation and shifting power is also being integrated into conversations around compensation and power and value.

We dive into the specifics of operationalising change in equitable compensation and pay in INGOs in the development and humanitarian sectors.

Kim Kucinskas is the Technical Director, Organizational Transformation at Humentum, a global nonprofit that unlocks the strategic power of operating models for social good organizations. She helps individuals and organizations who are on a journey towards greater equity identify,  understand, and operationalize transformation. Kim’s priority is to support individuals to be more effective in their work and organizations to be prepared for the future. To achieve results, she creates connections between strategy and practical operations by building networks, facilitates co-creation, and supports organizations through consultancies. This is the case with the TIME (Transforming INGO Models for Equity) initiative, a case study in action of power shift where Kim acts as Project Director. In another example of connecting the dots between strategy and practical solutions, Kim led an 18-months long compensation working group of nonprofit compensation practitioners, which resulted in the co-created Equitable Compensation Playbook.

Dr. Ishbel McWha-Hermann is an Associate Professor in international HRM at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Scotland. She uses psychological research to enhance social justice and fair reward in organisations, particularly in international work contexts. Ishbel is Founder and Director of Project Fair, which brings together HR and reward managers from INGOs, to develop research based pathways to fairer reward policies and practices. She has undertaken consultancy and provided expert advice to numerous international organisations, including the United Nations. 

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Kate:

Hello everyone, I'm Professor Kate Bird and I'd like to introduce this episode of the Power Shift Decolonising Development. In today's episode we speak to Kim Kucinskas and Dr. Ishbel McWha-Hermann about equity in compensation and fair reward in international development organisations. We talk about the Equitable Compensation Playbook, which organisations can use as a benchmark to reflect their approaches to compensation, as well as Project FAIR. Kim and Ishbel tell us about equitable compensation as being rooted in challenging Western ideologies around pay. The discourse around decolonisation and shifting power is also being integrated into conversations around compensation and power and value. We dive into the specifics of operationalising change in equitable compensation and pay in INGOs, in the development and humanitarian sectors. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, the podcast bringing together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action. I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Hello, I'm Dr. Ndlovu. I'm a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focus on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.

Kate:

Thank you, Nompilo. Today, we're very excited to be talking to Kim Kucinskas and Ishbel McWha-Hermann. Kim's a Technical Director of Organisational Transformation at Humentum, a global non profit that unlocks strategic power of operating models for social good organisations. She helps organisations and individuals who are on a journey towards greater equity identify, understand, and operationalise transformation. Kim's priority is to support individuals to be more effective in their work, organisations to be prepared for the future. An example of her work is leading an 18 month long compensation working group of non profit organisations and practitioners, which resulted in the co creation of the Equitable Compensation Playbook. Ishbel is an Associate Professor at an international HRM, at the University of Edinburgh Business School in Scotland. She uses psychological research to enhance social justice and fair reward in organisations, particularly in international work contexts. Ishbel is founder and co director of Project Fair which brings together HR and reward managers from INGOs to develop research based pathways to fairer rewards and policies and practices. She's undertaken consultancy and provided expert advice to numerous international organisations, including the United Nations. For more on Kim, and Ishbel and the work they've done together in the respective organisations, please click on the show notes below this episode. Now I'm going to hand back over to Nompilo for our first question. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

All right. Thank you, Kate. Could you tell our audiences something of the background about how you came to work together and the theme that you have been working on?

Kim:

Yeah, I'm happy to start. So, as Kate mentioned, Humentum really works to realise the power of strategic operations. And so we work with things like the structures of organisations and people and culture and finance and risk and compliance. And as part of those conversations, what I realised is that compensation has always been a popular topic. But in the last maybe two, two and a half years, the issues of equitable compensation have really started to come up and increasingly and come to the fore. And, it started during the pandemic. Everything was changing. Everything was in flux. In the U. S. we were facing a racial reckoning. In the global world we were facing a pandemic, and there were increasing a new upswing in the world of power shift and locally led development in our sector. Organisations were realising that there are new ways of working and that the world didn't fall down when people stopped traveling and all of these different things. And so the way that we did things was different. And so these issues of compensation started to come up again and again, and they started to feel intertangled and interwoven, and we found ourselves talking in circles. So what we did was we put together a working group of compensation professionals to try and figure out what actually is the problem. And what we realised was that traditional ways of working, traditional ways of compensating individuals and staff are no longer fit for purpose in today's world. And so we spent some time thinking about why is that happening? And one of the reasons that came up was, there's an increased discussion and focus on equity, but we don't actually know what equity means. We don't have a common definition of what that looks like. And so what we did was we spent about a year identifying different archetypes of existing approaches that are currently happening. We came up with three and then we set about thinking about, okay, how do we make sense of these different archetypes? How do we help people use these to make sense of what's currently happening and what they need to change. And so that all turned into what we're calling the Equitable Compensation Playbook. It's a way for international organisations to reflect on what their existing approaches are and how to make it more equitable. And as we were doing this, a number of our working group members were also involved with Project Fair. And they said, hey, do you know about this organisation and what they're doing? There seems to be some synergy here. And I didn't. So I met with Ishbel and her colleague, Julia, and it became instantly clear that our work is truly complimentary and so we decided to team up.

Ishbel:

Yeah, perhaps I can add onto that a little bit from my perspective. So for me, I've been really studying this area of fair pay and INGOs for more than 17 years. I was working previously in the aid and development sector myself, and I was really struck actually through that work, seeing just the impact that these different salaries had on employees. So my background is in work psychology. So I came to the university to do my PhD really to understand what is the impact of these kind of dual salary systems. So paying national and international staff on different wages, what is the impact of that on employees well being and performance? And of course, kind of what we found was it's not good. It's not good for employees at work to feel that their systems are unfair. So after some time, you know, we talked about our research a lot and many of these organisations were saying, we know this is a problem. We know our staff aren't in a good space. We just don't know what to do about it. And so that was the point, 2016, when I founded Project FAIR. The idea here really was to flip the focus to say, instead of problematising this and saying, you know, what you're doing is terrible for your staff, working with the INGOs to really bring them together, to share lessons learned, look for best practices so that we could shift towards fairer systems. It's very difficult. It's very complex. Trying to change pay structures is not something you can just do overnight. And the more I learn about it, even after 17 years, the more I learn, the more complex it becomes. And I realise it is. I think though, yeah, for me, what really keeps me going is that these organisations, they really want to change. They just don't know how. And so that's what we're kind of trying to help with at Project FAIR is actually, let's do some research. Let's learn from one another and help to kind of create a fairer space for everybody.

Nompilo:

Okay, sounds exciting. And difficult at the same time. Before I move to the second question, can I just ask a follow up? Especially to Kim to say you spoke of compensation professionals, the working group. But what was the criteria behind who formed that working group, the initial working group that you kind of had? You don't have to name organisations, because that could be quite personal, but to kind of say, what were you looking for? What's that initial working group?

Kim:

That's a good question? So we've been bringing together people in informal spaces since the start of the organisation, but during the pandemic, we really ramped it up and people were meeting on a weekly basis because things were changing just so quickly. And so we would bring together a number of executive HR and CEOs together, for example, to talk about the changing way of work. And so it really kind of, I think, pulled from that core group. And the first criteria is we always are looking for a coalition of the willing. So really people who will get it and who are motivated and who are willing to bring themselves to the space. But then really we're looking for practitioners, those who are in it and doing it, and kind of digging in the weeds and the nuance, because as Ishbel said, this is nuanced, complicated, complex issues and so it's not looking at it from a theoretical level. It's really thinking about how is this being applied in practical terms because those individuals are the ones who know the issue the best. And so we had a pretty good spread of really large organisations and small, and as I'm sure you know, there are some differences in terms of resources, in terms of even the internal capacity within organisations, not all organisations have compensation practitioners who can dedicate their time to this, for example. And so one of the reasons that we wanted to do this was to leverage the power of those organisations who did have that resources so that smaller organisations who may not have that expertise can benefit.

Nompilo:

Thank you for highlighting that you started with your existing networks and then expanded from there. The second question. What links equitable compensation with decolonising, localising and anti racist approaches in the global development and humanitarian sectors?

Ishbel:

Shall I go first this time, Kim? Yeah. Please, go. Okay, so it's a big question and a very, very important question. And actually, I don't often talk about it in those specific words in Project FAIR. I don't say we're trying to decolonise pay because we're already dealing with such an emotive kind of topic here. Pay itself is emotive, it's confronting, and I think decolonisation as a concept also has those kind of emotions associated with it, which can make it quite difficult to bring them together and have a constructive conversation. But really, when we talk about fairness, and when we really strip it back, it's actually about that shift away from those outdated models of aid, that kind of unquestioning prioritisation of those Western and neoliberal ideologies to starting to think about what are other forms of knowing and ways of thinking and how are those incorporated into what we're doing within the aid and development sector. They're so important and they've been absent for so long. When we think about pay, we historically kind of structure it around the idea of this international expert who's delivering something to a local kind of novice. And this sets up a power dynamic. And then of course, when we pay people in different ways, international and national, that reinforces that power dynamic. And so really, when we come down to it, it looks to me like this is a colonial dynamic that's being reinforced through these pay systems. And in our research, I don't know if it's helpful to hear some kind of figures around this, but in our research, we found that similarly skilled and qualified people who were doing very similar jobs earned on average four times more if they came from abroad and then sometimes in some countries this was up to 10 times more. And that's massive if you think the person you're sitting next to you're doing a very similar job. You know, actually you probably have more context more understanding of the local context and they're earning 10 times your salary just because of where they come from. That starts to just really kind of rub so yeah, it's a very visible symptom of that kind of bigger systems problem that we're trying to address. So yeah, I guess I mean at its base it really is just about helping organisations to start to question some of those historical structures to say why do we use these systems? Actually, why do you use international staff? Do you need international staff still? What purpose do they serve for your organisation? And you know, why do you pay people on different salary scales? Sometimes that question, why, can really take quite a long way, I think, in challenging some of those very outdated models.

Kim:

And I would add, I mean, I think it's definitely a symptom of the broader system that we have been working in the traditional staffing structure and recruitment, how we recruit, how we staff, how we pay has all of those different power and equities that Ishbel has been talking about. I also would say that it's also a signal of where we're going, however. There's a whole lot of discourse and dialogue and resources around decolonising and power shifting and locally led development. And just as importantly, what I'm seeing is. Is that there is an increase in the amount of personal and institutional reflection and introspection about what needs to change and about what that means practically. So there are mindset shifts that are happening. And so the fact that we're having this conversation right now, I think, is a signal of that, of this change and this understanding that compensation keeps coming up consistently and persistently because it's based on value. When I get paid, it's a signal of what my value and my worth is. And we're having more and more open conversations and frank conversations around power and worth and value. And so that's why this thing keeps coming up and seems to be popping up, more and more. And how it's related to all of these broader conversations. I would say another way that it links into these broader conversations is just the sheer complexity of what this looks like. Ishbel mentioned this. This is not something that, you know, you're going to say, this is wrong, and so we're going to fix it. If we could have fixed it, we would have fixed it by now, if it was that simple. It's just, the more that I learn it is complex, it is nuanced, there's no clear right and wrong way to do things. And so it's not as easy as just saying, we should fix this, and so let's do it. And so that's where the real struggle is. The real struggle is in the process and in the how. And so there may never be the right answer, but what there can be is transparency, humbleness, openness for dialogue, and that is really, I think, mirrored in these broader conversations around power shift.

Ishbel:

Could I add to that? You're making me kind of think as well, you know, the concepts of decolonisation, localisation, they're quite high level concepts. And what we're doing with this pay in the compensation play kit is really operationalising that, it's really saying on a practical sense. What does that mean for the organisation? That's not even how the organisation interacts with the community. It's really inside your organisation. Those dynamics are really important. They also reflect those big topics, but we can kind of give you guidelines and help you to question what you're doing internally in that kind of sense.

Nompilo:

Okay, thank you. All right, next question. You have been wrestling with the issue of equitable compensation for some time. Your work has created a concrete result in that you recently published a guide on equitable compensation aimed at international NGOs. I think you mentioned it right at the beginning. You also launched a video introducing your approach and hosted an international webinar. Could you bring our listeners and viewers up to speed on the key principles of your approach?

Ishbel:

Sure. Shall I go first, Kim? Yeah. Okay. So from our perspective at Project FAIR, the Equitable Compensation Playbook, it's super exciting. Collaborating with Humentum in the U. S., we're based in the U. K., although both kind of organisations have this global reach. It really helped us to understand the issues from those different perspectives. And what we've done through the playbook is to signpost quite a lot of existing resources. So Project Fair resources as well as humanitarian resources. Our resources focus around kind of making strategic decisions about your current pay system. So, the questions I raised just earlier, you know, why do you do what you're currently doing? But then also looking at what a future fair system would look like. We know this is kind of an incremental process. Organisations won't go from something to something radically different. That is kind of a series of steps they need to go through. And so our resources aim to help them move through that process. So we have things like a toolkit. We have a self assessment quiz. And really importantly, we have a set of principles and standards of fair INGO reward. And we co created these principles and standards in 2018 with 25 international NGOs who are really passionate about this issue. So pre COVID, pre a lot of the kind of real ramping up of focus on this issue, there were organisations already saying this needs to be addressed and we don't have a North Star to work towards. So that was why we brought everybody together to really set up these principles and standards. And they're freely available for everybody to use. We have a set of five principles. So these are ethical reward, transparency, equity, sustainability and compliance and risk that underneath each of those principles we've set a series of standards which help to really make them quite practical so you can see what they actually mean in reality. So being able to embed those within the compensation playbook is super helpful and then the work that Kim and the working group did really kind of complements that and brings it to life much more because the playbook includes a worksheet which the working group have developed. And so it really gives concrete examples of what working group members have been doing and just examples of different types of pay structures. So you don't have to have this traditional system that is now outdated. There are lots of different ways you can change your system, whether you move to a single salary system to a hybrid system to a kind of a global system, there's lots of different types of approaches. And so I guess what the playbook does is it says, it's really a challenge. There is no one way to fix things, but look at the playbook, walk through the steps, ask the important questions, and think back on your own organisation's goals and values because that's where you really need to start in order to create that change that you're looking to create.

Kim:

Intentionality. We're looking for intentionality here and consistency, I think, is what it is. And so just to kind of expand on the workbook, because that's what the Humentum working group really focused on, I mentioned that we came up with those three different approaches. So the three approaches are location based, location agnostic and role based. And that's kind of currently what organisations in kind of broad brushstrokes how they're applying compensation. But what we realised was that those different approaches are not being applied universally to all staff in a global organisation. And so we really wrestled with this. And what we realised in the discussions was that the approaches for how an organisation provides compensation, benefits and allowances, are actually being applied differently to different employee categories. So when you start to break it down by employee category, then you start to create a framework that can be consistently applied. And it is those employee categories that are currently changing and evolving and in flux in today's changing work environment. So, for example, as INGOs are moving away from what a traditional headquarters is, as making headquarters as more role based versus location based or as INGOs are moving away from expats or third country nationals, the different employee categories are changing and what used to maybe work, although, as Ishbel says, it probably didn't even back then, is becoming even more and more apparent that this isn't working. And so, the framework is asking organisations to map what their current status is. What are our current approaches as we apply them to the different employee categories? And some organisations may not even be clear about what their employee categories are. So that's even a first stop. And then to critically reflect what's working, what's not, what needs to change, where are we not living our values, where are we not being accountable or equitable or resilient. And what's interesting about this playbook is that it can be done individually. So there can be done individual reflection by, for example, the compensation practitioner, or it can be applied at the institutional or organisational level. And one of the things that we really did want to build because the practitioners were building this is actually an advocacy tool to use with senior leadership teams and to use it as a dialogue tool to have these conversations and to say, what do we mean by fair? What do we mean by transparent? Who? How are we going to consistently apply that across the organisation? And this provides some guiding questions to have those difficult conversations.

Kate:

So, you've consulted widely in order to develop the approach that you are articulating here today. I wonder if you could outline what you think are the key challenges in delivering an equitable approach to compensation. You've identified some of the challenges already, but I wonder if you could expand on that.

Ishbel:

Yeah, I mean, there are lots. I mean, I think first and foremost, it's really just a lack of reliable knowledge about what else to do. There is a lot of fear about if we make some changes, what will happen to the organisation? The organisation is doing good work now. We don't want to stop. But actually, how do you actually shift that away to something else? And I think then is the second question about what equitable compensation actually means. So it's a very subjective kind of question. It's not stable. So for some people, equitable compensation or fairness is all about ensuring consistent salaries between employees within country offices. So that in one location, it's clear that everybody has a structure and that it's relatively fair based on a set of kind of underlying principles. But for others, it's more about saying across different country offices, that's what we want to be fair. So we want to see, you know, if we've got a country director in two different offices, they're earning the same amount of money. For others, they go even further to say, it needs to be one global salary system for the whole organisation. Practically speaking, those are really difficult to implement and to kind of develop. But also what you need to think about is, what do you actually mean by fairness? How are you defining that from the outset as an organisation? It's subjective, it depends on each individual, and it's not stable. It depends on what context you find yourself within. So, you know, it depends. In this context, we might think about or wonder what it's like to work, you know, where you work, whereas if we're in our own organisation, or if we're at a party with friends, the way that we compare our pay will, of course, change. So that's what I mean by, you know, it's kind of not stable. So I think one of the key challenges is really going right back to basics to be clear what foundation you're starting from in terms of what fairness actually means for your organisation. You don't have to have everybody agreeing with that, but you just need to have a transparent kind of system. Or a transparent definition for this is what we mean, and this is why we do it and have conversations, make sure everybody understands that they may not agree with it, but it needs to be kind of clear. I can go into more detail about kind of specific challenges, but overarching, I think, that that is a real issue. And then once you start to roll out making changes and thinking about how to do that, a big third challenge is the quality of the data that exists. So when you start to use benchmarking data in local countries, you know, what you have to remember that that is a reflection of the current state in that location. So it has any kind of biases, any, you know, inherent biases are still baked into the data. So the data itself is not objective. It's probably skewed for senior roles being more well paid. But if you keep saying we're going to pay people at the 50th percentile or the 70th percentile, that's not going to change the relative kind of dynamic between employees. So we know, for example, one organisation in our network has decided to pitch their senior roles at the 30th percentile of the market data because they recognise that salaries for those roles are inflated compared to the other roles. The roles who are generally at the bottom of the organisation, they have really much lower pay. So it's really interesting to see them doing that and trying to be very active about making that change. There's all sorts of other challenges as well, thinking about, getting buy in from senior management, making them understand that this is not just an operational challenge. This is actually really an imperative for your organisation. It's a really key issue strategically, reputationally, really important. I'm thinking about donor restrictions also. So sometimes funders require particular roles to be filled by expatriates or by a national of the country from which they are funding, you know, if it's a Norwegian, for example, or a US funding agency, sometimes they say, you know, the project manager has to be from our country, and they have to be paid on an international salary. And so then, the best will in the world makes it really hard for you to actually shift your organisation away from those kinds of systems. I'll maybe pass over to Kim now.

Kim:

Yeah, I would agree with all of those. And I think we could talk about a lot of those challenges all day long. I mean, I think if you want to go back to basics, as I mentioned in our working group, we started with how do you define equitable compensation? And the way that we defined it is we said compensation needs to be comparatively fair, so we didn't say equal. We said comparatively fair, consistently applied and transparently communicated, and it sounds simple, but when you break it down, it can get really complex. So, I mean, Ishbel, I've learned so much from her about what it means to be comparatively fair, but what the big takeaway for me is you don't get to cheat. You don't get to just borrow someone else's definition. Your organisation has to do the work because it means something different for every single organisation. Each context is different. Each geographical, each structure is different. And so you don't get to just cheat. You didn't take the easy way or you have to do the internal work. And that means having the conversations and making sure that there's buy in and understanding across the board and then consistently applied it. You have to acknowledge sometimes there's going to be scenarios where you cannot square the circle where you have to decide. Are you being fair to the person and to the role? Or are you being fair to the local market? And sometimes you can't square that circle. You can't say that you can do both. And so that's where the definition becomes really clear so that you can be consistent to what you mean across the board. Every time I talk to an HR person, I hear new examples of exceptions. There's so many exceptions out there, and it's incredibly nuanced and complex. And there's so many different scenarios that it's really easy to get bogged down in those individual scenarios because each individual scenario represents a person's life and their value and their worth. And so how do you create a framework and an approach that will work and then not just the policies, but the practice to apply that consistently. And then the transparently communicated I think can be one of the more difficult things. It's easy to say we believe in transparency. It's really hard to do on a topic that's so emotive. You can have the most thoughtful, deliberate approach and it's hard to communicate because you have to communicate up down across to all sorts of different stakeholders who are not HR professionals and don't know the ins and outs of different countries and laws and the differences between allowances and benefits versus compensation and what the whole package looks like. And every time you can be as clear as possible and people are still going to hear what they want to hear and misinterpret. And so the transparency part, I think, is a whole piece which requires education and patience and trust and a strong culture where people believe that you have strong intent and you have the ability to follow through on that intent. The bottom line is this stuff is hard. It's complex, it's nuanced, and it's not necessarily straightforward. And then you have all the different things that Ishbel mentioned around external pressures and environments that are not even in the control of an organisation to change.

Nompilo:

I'm just going to ask you something shortly, but as you were speaking, both of you, I thought that the use of the word transparency was going to be the hardest one. So I'm not surprised to hear that you brought it up as well, Kim. In the countries where I come from, South Africa, Zimbabwe, most of Southern Africa, it's actually illegal to be sharing your salary you know, with a fellow co worker in the office, right, it's actually illegal to even show your payslip. So, I mean, there's actually national laws where you don't do that, and so I even wonder how you start with data. It's not a question, I'm marveling at the fact that in everything you were saying, I keep thinking, the use of the word transparency is easy, but to actually make salaries transparent is...

Kim:

And the fact that it's illegal in some cases is what does that say about, you know, the culture and the value and our understanding about what this all looks like. If we're doing this all in secret, then where is the accountability for that? And so how are you also able to educate individuals about how all the pieces of a total reward system works if you can't talk about it. And I know in the U. S. It's starting to almost go the opposite where you are required to provide pay grades on recruitment postings and so that's starting to break down barriers because it almost takes away the decision point from the organisation because they have to do it legally. But there's what you do legally. And then there's making sure that your staff understand have a buy in and interpret it correctly. And those are two different sets of challenges.

Ishbel:

Yeah. And that they trust that what you're telling them, you know, here, if you're maybe publishing your salary structure, you don't have to, I mean, obviously not publishing specific individual data, but your salary structure on your website, your staff need to trust that that's actually what's happening. And it's not all exceptions because as Kim said, there are so many exceptions. So many people are, you know, red circled so that they just carry on with their salary until they leave the organisation, which, yeah, is another challenge.

Kate:

So thank you for running through those details with us. And I guess one of the things that strikes me is that you've talked about nuance a lot, you've talked about challenges, but you've also talked about how a large number of international NGOs came together in 2018, quite a long time ago now, and voluntarily started working on this together. So although there are challenges and although it is nuanced and complicated, there's also commitment and commitment to change. So, I wonder if before we move on, you could give, obviously not naming organisations, but some kind of concrete examples of positive change that you've seen out there in the world where fair compensation is being taken seriously and progressive changes have been made.

Ishbel:

Absolutely. I mean, we've started, I think, since even before 2018, we started creating case studies of organisations. So on the Project Fair website, you'll find a number of case studies that really outline organisations who have made change. And so that can be, there are different, as I mentioned earlier, it's an incremental process to change. So for some organisations where they don't have any kind of system in place, many smaller organisations don't actually have a standard pay structure in place. So for them, just starting to get a pay structure in place so that everybody is, you know, their jobs have been kind of evaluated for their size and for the kind of skills and competencies that you require to do those jobs. And then you put them together in a structure of relative pay. So that's kind of a first point towards fairness. That in itself is a good step for organisations who haven't had that in the past. And then you go to the other extreme where we've got a number of organisations in our network who have completely shifted to a single salary system. So they've just said we no longer have international and national contracts. We no longer pay people on those two different salary systems. We've literally shifted towards a single system. It's based in the location where the people work, because it's all about the kind of cost of living and the relative wealth that they would have, according to the space that they're located. And so we've seen, there are a number of organisations who have done that already. Typically they're kind of mid sized organisations. The larger organisations we are working at the moment with two or three really big organisations who are on a really big journey and it takes a long time. So for some of them, it's been kind of three, five years where they've been planning and thinking about. How do we want to get to where we want to go? What do we want that to look like? Having lots and lots of discussion with their staff as well to get buy in, to get senior management to understand, but also employees to understand, what are we doing and why are we doing it? And why is this a values led kind of proposition? So, yeah, so that's a few examples. And you can, as I said, see many more examples on the website. I'm always happy to share it because I think it's so important to kind of learn from what others have been doing.

Kate:

Thank you.

Kim:

I think the only other thing I would add is, I'm seeing a decrease in the use of expats and an increase in local or more proximate hiring. And I think there are instances where organisations are doing what they can. So sometimes, as Kate mentioned, they can't do away with expats totally because of the way that their funding requirements are. But there is definitely a trend in recognising that where there are international hires if you will, it needs to be intentional, deliberate and ideally with a sustainability plan in for how to make that transition.

Kate:

Yeah, thank you. And I just want to emphasise to all the listeners and viewers that our show notes link through to the Project Fair website and case studies, and also to the Equitable Compensation Playbook, and something that strikes me from what you've both just said, is that although civil society organisations and INGOs may be seeking to make progressive changes and to move towards an equitable compensation framework, they are within a broader ecosystem. And if their donors are requiring nationality based hires, which I didn't realise happened in my naivety, then making these changes is difficult. And I suppose that that kind of brings up again this issue that we're not acting in isolation, we're acting together. For us at the Development Hub, one of the things that we've bought into is the fact that the change happens in community. And none of us are acting alone. And it's through working together that progressive change can happen. So I suppose this leads on to my next question, which is, how the issue of equitable compensation within international NGOs fits within wider structural issues. So, for example, how different roles within international and interracial teams are valued and compensated across organisations working in networks and partnerships can lead to gradients in pay. So you can have large international NGOs paying more highly than small, local civil society organisations. You can have civil society organisations paying more highly than local government organisations or national government organisations. And what I've seen, in many of the countries that I've worked in in the past is that national civil society organisations, national governments and local governments find it very hard to retain good staff. They train them, they build their capacity, and then those people need leave, they're head hunted or they move on to an international NGO or they move on to the UN system. It's very hard to build the capacity that's necessary to actually drive locally led development. So when we're thinking about equitable compensation, it's within a context and that context is where we're wanting to see locally led development. And I want to kind of just explore the contradictions there, all the tensions between doing good within the international NGO system or being more equitable there, but creating greater disparity between the international NGO system and local civil society or local national organisations. I wonder if you could explore those issues a bit for me.

Ishbel:

Yeah, should I start, Kim, because I've got kind of a quick response and maybe pass it to you. Yeah, I mean, I think you are raising such an important issue. And actually, it's something that I studied in my PhD right back way back when this kind of idea of a hierarchy of different types of organisations, but also different jobs within the organisations, looking across the whole ecosystem. We've got volunteers. We've got consultants. We've got contractors. We've got expatriates and then we've got the national staff in those categories as well and it's really a problem. It really is. but as you say the kind of idea of international organisations poaching those good stuff from the national organisations. It's really a challenge. And what we promote through Project Fair is using the national context as your benchmark, as your kind of poor point of reference. So the idea is not to be bringing everybody's pay up, but actually to be bringing international NGO salaries into line with the local context. They shouldn't be inflated. You know, for people who are doing similar roles in similar organisations, they just simply shouldn't get more just because it's an international NGO. I mean, maybe I'm a bit idealistic, but that, I hope, is where things will shift towards. It's not about trying to inflate salaries within the system, but actually make sure that the system is reflecting the local context. We don't want to be undermining those local economies in any way. When I lived in Cambodia, and I was absolutely stunned. I mean, this was about 20 years ago now. I was absolutely stunned the dual economy that was in existence. You know, there was the expatriate economy, and then there was the local economy. And it was so confronting to me. That was what really prompted me to want to do all of this research and understand it much more. But that's the kind of thing we need to shift away from. This should not be a highly paid, you know, people get into aid and development work because they want to help others. It should not be a way to get really rich. And yeah, passing to you, Kim.

Kim:

I think your original question is getting, you mentioned the ecosystem, we all know that there are structural challenges and structural barriers to real transformation. And that's the broader question around decolonising aid or locally led development. And I think compensation fits squarely in that the reality is that most organisations, both I NGOs and national civil society organisations don't have full autonomy over how they do their operations. And that includes how they compensate, how they recruit, how they pay their staff. And that's a really big structural issue. Just to clarify, I am not a compensation expert. I work with a lot of smart compensation experts, so I don't know that there are requirements for specific nationality of hires, but there are often key personnel requirements, which kind of skew the game, if you will, so there are funders who say we are looking for X amount of experience in this area, et cetera, and that basically puts a certain pool of people in that are eligible for being hired and excludes a certain pool. And those are the certain things that structurally, I think, need to change. So that's one way that we can start to, to level the playing field. And then the other thing I think when we think about systems change is, and you wanna explore some of these tensions, is are we talking about at the individual level of change? Are we talking about that kind of sector systems level of change? Because we have to remember that really the system is made up of an end of a number of individuals that are pulled together as a collective, and it's hard to change the game midway through. There are going to be these tensions and these kind of growing pains. If I'm an individual working in Cambodia, and I'm working for a national civil society organisation, and I'm given the opportunity to work for an INGO and increase my buying power, increase my positional power by moving up, it's understandable to see why that would make sense to me as an individual. It's also understandable to see at the systems level how that doesn't make sense, from a market system, from a long term perspective, etc. But again, there's no real easy answer. I think the obvious answer is long term to level that playing field, to create an enabling environment for national civil society organisations to hire enough staff to pay them properly. And part of that is around busting myths about what it costs to do development work. So no, we don't want people to get rich to do their work, but we also want them to get paid fairly and we want them to have the appropriate value for what they do. And so these are all structural issues that are often outside individual control.

Kate:

Thank you so much. One of the contradictions that I can hear in the answers that you've given me is that you've talked about bringing salaries in line with local context, but you've separately talked about role based salaries. So I can imagine, for example, somebody being paid based on their role, whether they're in New York or Nairobi. And if that's the case across a global organisation, then if they're being paid at the New York salary rate in Nairobi, that's not necessarily going to be in line with local context, so you've got these tensions within the system and this is where it comes back to the principles that you were outlining earlier about transparency and consistency and clear communication and so on, that you have to pick an approach, pick a horse.

Kim:

And that's where we're talking about what's your definition of fair, because that example you just gave is exactly what's happening. And maybe 10, 15 years ago, a lot of the global support roles, for example, let's say we're talking about for a large INGO, the CFO of the entire organisation used to be hired in New York. And so that salary scale made sense. But in today's world, the CFO could get hired in Nairobi. And so are you hiring them based on that traditional headquarters, if you will, salary scale or on the local market rate? And an organisation needs to have an approach and needs to have a rationale behind that approach and then being able to consistently apply that. And one way to do it, I think Ishbel, is to say, okay, here's the local Nairobi market rate, but it may be a different grade within that market rate because they have global responsibilities instead of local responsibilities. And that's one way that many organisations are trying to square that circle.

Ishbel:

Yeah. So you could have a structure which said the grade that a role would be at, and then you would use the local data for that role. So you would say, right, that role, say it's a grade D. We know that in a Nairobi market, this is what that is worth. And we know that in a New York market, this is what that is worth. We haven't talked at all about remote working, which is another real challenge. But, you know, the idea there is you've got a consistent structure in place, but you're applying it, you're applying the data, the local market data from those different locations. And then as Kim said, if you have a role that then has a global scope, or maybe a regional scope, that's kind of baked into the structure that you're using. So you say, right, if you've got a global scope, you're going to be a higher grade and that higher grade will include different things. So there's a lot of art in there. And one of the people in our steering group talks about this as being a science and an art because you can't just take the data and use it. You have to really be thoughtful about how you're using it and why you're using it in different ways. Constantly looking at what everybody else is doing as well to make sure you're not inflating the market or indeed positioning yourself too low that you won't be able to recruit for those kinds of roles. So it's really a complex challenge.

Kim:

And can I just add one thing, which is, you know, as we get into these details, imagine now that I'm a small organisation and I have an HR generalist, you know, I don't have someone who's able to pull all this data and look at different country rates, all this stuff, so then what do you do? How do you kind of work within the constraints and the resources that you currently have? So it's all a balance. Mm hmm.

Kate:

And that's where the guidance that you've provided is so valuable to these smaller organisations, because you're drawing on the expertise of larger organisations and a whole set of experts. And that's what's so great about this interview is that we're really getting into the nitty gritty of actually operationalising real change and I love that. Nompilo, do you have any final questions to ask before I move on to our closing question?

Nompilo:

I have a lot of questions, but I'll have to keep them to myself. I did wonder, is there anyone right now, any category of people, persons that are falling outside of the confines of what your organisations can provide. For example, legally, you have so many African countries that don't recognise the LGBTQ community, right? For example, so in Uganda or anything like that, it doesn't matter what you would think is fair play, right? Or what their financial needs are because of certain health areas or things that they need to address. So are we seeing it almost having to cater for normativity, and then then there's a whole lot of people that fall outside of that. Are there parts of this playbook that actually will never have or have everybody involved, who's left out?

Ishbel:

Yeah, I think it's such a great and such an important question. We try and have those DEI conversations in parallel because we say pay is just the really visible manifestation of inequality, but there's so much more. And I think the process of asking a lot of these why questions will help to bring some of these other points out. But there are real power challenges in any kind of system that you're putting in place. So yeah, I think you're right. There will absolutely be people who are missed. And I think the other real challenge is making sure that there is not someone sitting in headquarters designing a system that has been imposed somewhere else, because that is, of course, what we definitely don't want to happen. It needs to be based on the local context, on what makes sense locally as well. So, for example, the research I've been doing around what does it mean to be fair? We know in a kind of a Western neoliberal space, so I'm in the UK, we tend to focus on equity. It's a kind of a meritocratic perspective, but we absolutely know that in other countries there's more of a need based perspective or more of an equal kind of absolute equality based perspective. And if we're only focusing on that equity piece, we're absolutely imposing, again, another kind of idea on these other other ways of thinking, which we wanna avoid. So I mean, I know this is kind of a long way to get back to your question, but really it's about all of that has to be stripped back and questioned as who is being left out? What are we standing for? Why are we saying a meritocratic perspective is the right way to go? Why do we say somebody who has a university degree earns more than somebody who doesn't? Does that actually matter? Maybe it does now in the UK. That's kind of what we've been brought up like, but does it really matter? So all of those really difficult questions and then after that, I mean, we still need to ask all of those more minute questions of who else is actually being absent in this. So it's, I think, as you say, it's like a really kind of layered, very deep, very structural challenge. But we do very much try and bring in that thought around this isn't just a pay issue. This is an organisation wide issue. It's a sector wide issue. It's a societal wide issue that we need to be engaging with.

Nompilo:

I feel like you should come back for another podcast. Over to you, Kate

Kate:

Thank you. So, Kim and Ishbel, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your ideas and your knowledge with us. To finish up, I wonder if you can each identify a practical step that our listeners and viewers can take to implement equity and shifting power whether they're members of the engaged general public or the development and humanitarian sector.

Ishbel:

For me, this is a question of values. I think it's about asking what values underpin your thinking about what fair pay is. Our project fair principles and standards offer a concrete set of principles that the sector can aim to work towards to try and create fairer pay systems. And I think central to these are really questions about transparency and consistency in how decisions are being made. But, as I've just said, this is really very much based on a kind of a set of assumptions about what fairness means and what you value as being fair. So for me, you know, the first step really is question this, ask yourself, ask your organisation, ask your colleagues what fair pay means, recognise that we all have different perspectives on it. And so as we're trying to shift towards a fairer system, we really need to go back in and first define what we mean by fairer.

Kim:

I mean, I can't agree more. I think it starts with asking the right questions, which is why we just we developed this playbook in this workbook. It's really a guide for a process of reflection. And so if compensation is a manifestation or a symbol of power and value, then what can I do? I can ask myself, where do I hold power? How do I wield that power? Where can I share that power? Where can I cede that power? And I think with respect to compensation, what we can be asking ourselves is how can I use my voice to ask those tough questions in the organisation? Because oftentimes these questions are not being asked. So, even better, I think, is to ask the tough questions and then not to expect there to be a simple solution that's going to happen overnight. I think to ask the tough questions and then be in it for the long haul and dig into these, the complexity and these nuances and the messiness and hold space for that. I think we need to get better at holding space for the messiness and for the complexity. And we need to get better at holding space for trying and failing forward and being transparent about it. As long as we're all moving in the right direction.

Kate:

Thank you so much. So, Kim and Ishbel, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. And to all our listeners and viewers, if you want to know more about their work, please check in the show notes and you'll be able to click through to various websites and resources. So thank you very much and goodbye from me.

Kim:

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.