Hourly Wage Increases and Structure
We did an analysis and overhaul of our wage structure for hourly crew members to reflect the vision and values of our business and crew. For a business with it’s foundations in hospitality, it can be hard to increase wages due to financial pressures, but we found a system we think is going to work for us.
We created a system where a base rate is available, depending on which area of the business you are in. There are a few different ways to increase wages from that point: 1yr anniversary pay-bump, specialist roles, cicerone server qualifications, and taking on hourly leadership positions.
Another goal was to have as many of our team earning above the Living Wage level for our community. Living wage is “the hourly amount a family needs to cover basic expenses in the community they live. Living Wage provides a basic level of economic security, but still represents a conservative, bare bones budget”. B-Corp encourages businesses to find ways to achieve this for their people, so we wanted to take on that challenge. You can find out what the living wage is for your community through a quick google search, we found ours here: https://vibrantabbotsford.ca/living-wage/living-wage-fraser-valley.
With these changes (coming into effect June 1st), 95% of our crew will be earning above living wage, which is awesome! As our business matures, we plan to close in that last 5%.
Field Guide Handbook
This was mentioned in our last post, which we finalized and is now available to our whole crew. Oh yeah!
Benefits
We’re also moving forward with our benefits plan! We’ll be moving ahead with a 50/50 coverage plan with 50% of the costs being paid by each the crew member and the business. This will also be starting on June 1st – to start, this will be available to:
– All salaried crew members
– All full time hourly crew members (30+ min hours per week)
– All part time hourly crew members (available, but 100% of the cost to be paid by the crew member)
This is our starting point, as we grow we’ll look for opportunities to improve this further.
Collaborative Feedback Process
This was mentioned in our last post as well, and full disclosure, we didn’t finish it off. We’re still working to implement the last piece – our Annual Development Session. There’s no excuses here, this is a BIG priority for us, and we need to make sure this is finished and integrated into the business.
Engagement Health-Check
This was on our original post as a project, and we’re pretty much done! B-Corp recommended doing engagement checks at least annually to gather information on – you guessed it – the engagement of your people with the business & their roles. They recommended a couple of organizations that have built tools that do this, like Gallup :https://q12.gallup.com/public/en-us/Features.
While it was tempting to just jump on that tool and tick this box, naturally we wanted to challenge ourselves to create our own tool that would get us exactly the information we think drives our crew culture.
This is an anonymous Typeform (did we mention Typeform before?? We use this a LOT for our communications) in which the crew will select their team/area and answer a very short list of yes/no questions. We’ll be posting our first one out to our team very soon, and hopefully gather some really actionable insights into where to focus more energy in each area to get our crew engaged in their roles. We plan on doing this 4 times per year, so we’ve got our fingers on the pulse.
Paternity & Maternity Leave Program
We finished this off as well (good timing, since 2 of our crew members are expecting new arrivals VERY soon!), and this is what it currently looks like:
Any new parent on our team will get 2 weeks paid vacation around the birth of their child to spend concentrated time with their bubba.
Following that, the next 4 weeks will be as flexible as possible (depending on the role) to allow as much time at home as we can. We’ll encourage as much work that can be done from home in that 4 weeks, to be done from home.
The business will commit to working with any government maternity/paternity unpaid leave benefits that either parent takes advantage of, planning in advance for any changes needed.
For any crew going on extended parental leave, we’ll discuss in advance what returning to work looks like, depending on the role and duration of leave. If wanting to return full-time, the crew member will either return to the same role they had, or a comparable role – which will be confirmed before the leave begins.
Okay – that’s it! Feels good to be chipping-away at small goals towards B-Corp amongst the craziness of the day-to-day. Feels a little daunting that we’re still only on our PEOPLE part of the process, so lots more to come.
xo The Field House Crew