Employees of a Florida insurance company have to ask their coworkers to vote on whether they get a raise — and none of it is anonymous

pulse

November 6, 2018 8:08 PM

If a majority of the company votes in favor of the raise, then it gets approved — but none of the votes are anonymous.

Asking your boss for a raise can be intimidating enough.

But at one Florida-based company, your boss isn't the only person who gets a say — the whole office gets a vote.

Since it was founded in 2003, travel insurance site Squaremouth has had a policy of peer-reviewed raises, according to a CNN profile of the company by Kathryn Vasel. That means that when employees feel they deserve a raise, they bring it before their coworkers at a company-wide meeting.

Employees typically have until the end of the day to make a decision and must provide their reasoning for their votes, according to CNN. If a majority of the company votes in favor of the raise, then it gets approved. None of the votes are anonymous.

CEO Chris Harvey said the policy is in place to increase transparency in the workplace.

"There is no stopgap," Harvey told CNN. "We rely on everyone having enough information and being intelligent enough that they will vote for an acceptable raise."

According to the article, the majority of raise requests get approved: 39 out of 41 since 2010, the company said. Additionally, managers have the power to award smaller merit-based raises, and employees automatically receive an annual raise to adjust for cost of living.

"I remember my boss telling me he wanted to pay me more, but he got hit with so much red tape. All that is eliminated here," marketing and sales director Megan Moncrief told CNN.

Squaremouth also promotes transparency by posting each employee's salary internally — a practice that's growing in popularity. Recent research suggests workers perform worse when company-wide salaries are kept under wraps, despite the longstanding taboo of divulging how much you earn to your coworkers.

Meanwhile, most workers have no idea whether they're being paid fairly, according to one study, and transparency about why some employees are paid more than others can lead to higher employee satisfaction overall.

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