Latest / Beyond the Paycheck / How to Fund a Bonus Program Without Killing Morale: Kong's Ademar Martins on Creative Budgeting, Pay Transparency, and the Calculator That Saved the Rollout
Transcript
- Kelsey Willock (00:42) Welcome, Ademar Martins, Head of Total Rewards and People Operations at Kong, Inc. We're so excited to have you this afternoon to kick us off. I'd love for you to share with our audience a little bit about yourself, where you're calling in from, a little bit about your career and your current role today. Ademar Martins (01:00) Sure, I'm calling in from the Salt Lake City area. I work at a company called Kong Inc. currently, which is an AI connectivity company. And I've spent almost two decades now in the HR space ever since I got my MBA doing a host of different HR roles. The two roles that I tend to get pulled into the most are HR business partner roles and total rewards roles. So this is my fourth time now leading total rewards company wide. ⁓ to public companies, to private companies. So good experience there. And currently, my role at Kong involves a mix of different HR areas like rewards, people ops, HR, tech, and workforce planning. Kelsey Willock (01:39) And can you tell me a little bit about the people you serve at Kong, such as, you know, a little bit of a demographic breakdown. Ademar Martins (01:44) Sure. I've, know, Kong is a software company primarily. So we have a lot of engineers ⁓ and sales ⁓ account executives who do the selling. And it's about a thousand employee organization growing globally quite a bit year over year, about 30 to 40 % annually. So a lot of your kind of white collar roles in the tech industry are what we see in. in the company. Kelsey Willock (02:12) Awesome. Well, thanks so much for sharing that with me. I have so many questions to follow up on, you know, all the great things that you're doing and have done in what seems like a really diverse background. So you have such a unique offering to share. But before we dive into those questions, I want to get to know you personally a little bit better. So can you share with me what was your first job and what did you do with your first paycheck? Ademar Martins (02:30) Sure. So my first job was as a paperboy when I was 11 years old in New Jersey. my first paycheck was actually, back then, I don't want to, I'm going to sound like I grew up in the 50s or something, but when I worked as a paperboy in 1990 is when it started, I would have to go collect the money from the customers. So I would have to go knock on their door every couple of weeks and say, hey, I'm collecting for the Courier News. and they would pay me cash for those last two weeks worth of newspapers. So my first paycheck was kind of just getting cash, collecting cash, door to door. That was my first experience. My first real paycheck was three years later when I worked at Subway, the sandwich shop. Getting my first paycheck there was amazing because I didn't have to go ask for it door to door anymore. So it was amazing. Kelsey Willock (03:28) nothing like auto deposit, auto pay. Do you remember what you spent that money on? Ademar Martins (03:35) You know, I was really into professional wrestling when I was a kid. So I would get tickets to the events and go to the shows and buy merchandise and just have fun. My mom was a single parent growing up and you know, she kind of had a hard time making ends meet. But with all of her kids kind of working like we did these little part-time jobs, we were able to do what we wanted, you know, be able to purchase what we wanted to purchase and with our own money. So it was great. Kelsey Willock (04:03) Going even further back, can you remember your earliest memory of money, even before your first job? Ademar Martins (04:09) You know, my first memory that I recall distinctly is when I was about five and it was like my first little transaction, you my first investment or attempted investment because I had a, I have a cousin who's the same age as me and I had a, I remember I had like two, one dollar bills, right? The equivalent of two one dollar bills and he had a five dollar bill. And I said, Hey, do you want to make a trade? You can have two. Like if you have two bills, if you trade me the one bill that you have. So that was like my first attempt at investments. But I remember one key thing that I think two key things that I learned from that experience was just my interest in that space of investing. But the second was, because I felt really icky, like after I tried to make that transaction with him and that stuck with me ⁓ all these years. And I always promised myself, whatever I do, I want to invest, I want to dabble in that, but I'm never going to earn any money dishonestly or in a way that takes advantage of anybody. And that was kind of the big learning moment for me back then. Kelsey Willock (05:19) It's such an important lesson to remember and it's such a young age at five years old recognizing that integrity is so important with how you show up with money. I'd love to be a fly on a wall in that situation where five-year-old you recognize, I shouldn't have done that. Ademar Martins (05:33) I cancelled the transaction, Kostya. I cancelled the Kelsey Willock (05:36) We gave it back. Tell me a little bit about how you think this money story, your relationship with your mother, even your first job has impacted how you show up for your people and even make decisions in terms of pay, benefits, total rewards and more. Ademar Martins (05:52) Yeah, that's a great question because it does impact me even to this day. know, growing up, seeing kind of living paycheck to paycheck and just experiencing that. Just I understand the importance of money to people in terms of them being able to pay their bills, right. For say for good things like, you know, kids college and things like that. Right. Like ⁓ I know that kind of what the employees going through. On the other hand, I know that I have a budget to work with usually, right? Like whatever program it is that I'm looking at, there's some limited budget involved with it. And for me, I get a kick out of, you know, getting the best outcome possible for the employee with that limited budget. So I try to get creative and ⁓ find ways to, you how can I, with this limited funding, how can I get the most bang for the buck here and, you know, impact employees in the most positive way possible. Whether it be, you know, choosing the most impactful benefit to offer. If we have like a limited number of benefits that we can offer, okay, well, what's the most impactful one of those or impactful few, right? That people are going to value the most and, you know, and having a pulse of that particular workforce. You asked earlier about, you know, what's the workforce like? I mean, depending on the company and the demographics and the population, different benefits may matter to one population versus another, right? So just understanding and serving the employees, understanding what matters the most to them, then, know, prioritizing offering those things that matter the most to them. And sometimes it's as simple as doing something like, you know, I had one case where finance was looking at know, find a financial solve and for that particular fiscal year. And they had made a recommendation to, you know, decrease the merit pool, like the merit budget for the salary increases for the year. And once I understood what they were trying to do, what they were trying to solve for, I gave them a counterproposal, right? I said, well, if that's what you're trying to solve, why don't we just change the effective date of the increases from, you know, April 1st to July 1st? Here's the savings that are going to come from that, from that one change. And it's like a win-win where the company achieves what they're trying to achieve, but we benefit the employees in the most that we can. And it's like one of those things that's like no good deed goes unpunished, where the employee is upset because now they got to wait three months longer than they're used to waiting for the increase. But little did they know that they were going to get half as much. If we had done it at the normal time, their increase would have been half as big. So it's just finding little ways like that to ⁓ maximize the dollars. Kelsey Willock (08:41) You bring up a really good point around budget and it's something that I think is a topic that's hard to ignore right now with rising costs of healthcare, et cetera. Where do you think compensation and benefits are really breaking down most often today? Really, is it budget? Is it healthcare? Is it understanding total rewards or something else? Ademar Martins (09:02) I think the last one that you said is a key one that I've noticed, understanding the total rewards. For me, it's communications. know, like communications is where things can break down a little bit. And that could be anything from the employee maybe having a benefit and not even knowing that they have it because it hasn't been communicated very well, hasn't been reinforced very well. Just the communication effort around it has been lackluster, maybe. the example I wanted to give for this one in terms of how communications can break down this current company, we actually implemented a bonus program last year. And when we did, we had to fund part of it from the, you know, talking about budgets again, right? We had to fund part of that transition to introducing bonus to everybody by funding it partly from the merit pool, right? Not entirely, like we still had some leftover for salary increases as well. ⁓ But the salary increases were smaller than usual in order to help fund this transition. That the company kind of took half of the costs as an incremental cost, as an investment, and the other half basically came from that merit pool. just foreseeing the concerns that people would have, the concerns they would have about that approach, they would feel like, ⁓ my gosh, you're decreasing my salary increase. You're taking something away from me. And just knowing that that would be the case, that things could break down in that way, we really tried to get ahead of it from the very beginning. know, like really prepare good training materials to have a good cascading approach of the information where we started with the very top, you know, getting this aligning with the CEO first and then his direct reports and then training all managers and ask allowing them to ask any questions that they had about the program. And then finally, as kind of a final round of cascading the information, go into all the employees, right? And explain to everybody, here's how all of this is going to work. And just coming up with materials that like calculators and things like that, like very simple calculators that were, they just made a couple of inputs. And as a result of that, they could see their before and after, like, had we not introduced the bonus program, what would you have made this next year? And... ⁓ instead with us introducing the bonus program, how much are going to make? And in that calculator, they would see that each month they were making a little less each month because of the lower salary increase. But then they could see clearly that at the end of the year came this big lump sum from the new bonus program that ⁓ made it all worthwhile, where they can make up to like 2x what they would have made in that same period. So just helping people understand how things are, how the program is going to work, how it's beneficial to them exactly, and showing them, demonstrating, illustrating it through examples and through using the math and helping them see for themselves that they were better off. Kelsey Willock (11:55) I love the example that you give because it's so personalized. While you can explain the math for how it works for each individual, for everyone overall, showing each individual person this is exactly how this is going to impact you, I imagine is a lot more successful in terms of how to communicate because that person's not reading some large complicated PDF. This is how this is going to affect me. That's why I should really read it. Ademar Martins (12:09) Yeah. Yeah, yeah Exactly. And the managers felt really relieved, you know, because the managers were nervous themselves as they were hearing how we were going to do this. They were nervous about the kind of questions that they would get. So when they saw some of those tools, they felt a lot better. They felt like, now I'm prepared to have these discussions. And now I get it. I follow the math here. I follow how people really are better off because even the design of the plan itself, right, we design a plan in a way that was, you know, while we're in transition, it was less risky. Like there was a higher weighting. on the individual metric versus the company metrics just in case, right? You never know. Just for so people felt like at ease that didn't have that angst of, my gosh, but what if the bonus doesn't pay out, right? So even little details like that, like from a plan design perspective helped set up the plan for success, you know, as well. Kelsey Willock (13:10) Well, thanks for sharing that example. I kind of want to double click on the manager component. How do you get managers to adopt new technology like this and be really incentivized to more effectively communicate what seems like fair and equitable pay to their employees? Ademar Martins (13:29) I think one thing is just to make it user friendly, know, whatever technology it is, ⁓ whether it's like, you know, we use all kinds of tools like for pay equity audits, we use tools like Sindio solutions and things like that, where they do all these robust statistical analyses and things like that. But just kind of breaking it down and communicating these things in a way that's very easy to understand. I always try to, when I think about like communicating these topics, I really try to take a layman perspective, know, how would I explain this really simply, you know, because those of us who work in the space, we're familiar with the terms, with the acronyms, with the topic in general, right? Sometimes we got to take a step back and really think like somebody who's hearing about this for the first time. And I do try to, you I run ideas like when we're putting tools together or putting communications together, I run it by a few people. that are not from the HR space at all, right? Maybe engineering, maybe somebody from sales, like people from the business basically, right? I run it by them and let them react, you know, just, and I just listen. So that the end product is a really user-friendly, really simple, easy to understand tool. So, you know, just getting that feedback early on in terms of building the communication and tools themselves. And then when we deliver the message, the trainings, having multiple sessions, recording them and providing them to anybody who would have missed the session, having open office hours on top to reinforce and to allow people to ask questions freely, just make ourselves available to answer any questions that they might have. And that has helped people be more willing to and more more readily adopt tools that we've developed. Kelsey Willock (15:24) It's so actionable as well. You know, it's not, you know, buy this new tool or ⁓ adopt this new technology or build this in-house. It's just share something with someone that's unfamiliar. And if they can't understand it, it's, it's expected that most probably won't. Ademar Martins (15:40) You're not there yet. Yeah, you're not there yet. If they don't understand it, you're not there yet. So you just gotta keep iterating. Kelsey Willock (15:49) Exactly. So I love this question that have next, which is, you know, tell us about something that you have changed within your organization, whether it's introducing a new product, a new vendor, a new initiative that has helped move from attracting talent to transforming lives. Ademar Martins (16:08) Great question. think in that space, it ends up being the simple things that have the most impact, I think. Because if you're talking about transforming lives, it makes me think about a lot of companies' approach when it comes to time off these days. At my current company, we offer flexible time off to begin with. And then we have a... an year-end shutdown where the whole company is out for like, you know, close to 10 days. So nobody's chasing anybody during that time. We have quarterly unplugged days where once a quarter the whole company is off on the same day as well. And it's like a three-day weekend once a quarter where everybody's tuned out. Right. We have a sabbatical. We just implemented a sabbatical this past year program for every five years of tenure. Every five years. Then you get four weeks of consecutive ⁓ time off as a sabbatical. And then other things that are also not necessarily cost heavy, but just recognition programs, where you encourage peer-to-peer recognition and ⁓ even non-monetary awards, where people feel recognized, they feel seen, they feel appreciated. It's just little simple things like that, implementing programs like that has gone a long way in terms of just helping people be engaged and enjoy being at work more, right? Because they feel seen, they feel appreciated. I think the, and I mentioned flexible time off, but even just flexible work schedules and locations, right? I know that's evolved quite a bit since COVID. That's transformed my own life. in the past, companies used to make me relocate. When they hired me, they made me relocate to their headquarters historically, and I had to move my family many times. Now for the last three companies in a row, I've worked from my home office. So how is that not transformative? My kids can have some stability now. They can grow up in the same house and go to the same school consistently. That's a big game changer. some small things like that that don't cost a lot of money or sometimes don't cost any money are huge in terms of ⁓ being transformative. Kelsey Willock (18:31) And when you're communicating up the impact you're having on changes like this that you're enacting, what are you seeking at the highest level? Is it that qualitative feedback that people are truly feeling better? Is it some type of an MPS score? Is it a recognition score? Really, what's the measurable impact that you're seeking? Ademar Martins (18:51) So we have a couple of ways to measure it. We have benefits-related surveys that we deploy each year to understand how things are going on the benefits side of things, what's going well, what's not going well, what employees are valuing. So that's ⁓ one tool that helps us get a sense of how the employees are feeling. And usually, you do see an uptick when you change something, when you offer something that you weren't offering. and it was something that they did value, I have tended to see an uptick on the score of those surveys. And then the other one is just the employee engagement survey, for the company-wide survey that we do. Some of the questions there give us a good sense of how employees are feeling and even things like the internal NPS. Would they recommend the company to someone else if we see an uptick in that? That's a good sense that we're heading in the right direction with our programs. Kelsey Willock (19:46) Are there specific tools or data sets that you're leveraging to help more effectively navigate those feedbacks? I've heard that, you know, lots of organizations typically build those in-house. Is that what you're doing or are you finding outsourced tools are helping you more effectively understand what's going on within the organization? Ademar Martins (20:07) And that has varied a little bit historically, depending on kind of the company's budget for like HR tech stack and what the company's appetite is for investing in that space. So sometimes it has been all internal tools, you know, ⁓ and I'm literally tracking things on like a spreadsheet, which is archaic. But if that's what the company's willing to spend on, that's where we go. And we do what we can do. But there are some good tools out there that I find very useful that go above and beyond what just a simple analysis on your own can do. One tool that I really like for pay equity, for example, is ⁓ Sindio Solutions because they help you gauge whether there's a statistically significant difference in pay. between men and women, between like in the US where we track ethnicity details, is there any statistically significant difference in pay between different ethnicities, right, within the US? And it helps us keep, be very proactive about things because when we have like a big event like ⁓ annual compensation review cycle, right, or a mid-year review cycle. before we approve any any changes that came through from the managers, we run all the before and after. Like before we did these changes, here's how we looked, here's how our pay equity audit looked. Now let's put all the revised numbers that the managers put in for their employees. How are things going to look afterwards? And are things better? Are things worse? Are things the same? You know, we really take a proactive approach with that and make sure that we're maintaining, that we're consciously maintaining pay equity with all these big events, these big compensation events that we hold each year. So that's a tool that I really like that can kind of help go above and beyond. And then there's other tools like just kind of reporting and analytics tools like Visier that have come in handy for just summarizing data very quickly and kind of automating things. Even Workday itself, just by creating reports and Workday that have what you need and having that at your fingertips to just run the refreshed, the latest version of it very quickly. Even something as simple as that is super helpful because it has all the information you need in one place and you're able to create different pivot tables and different tables, graphs ⁓ off of that raw data. And then when you pull the latest raw data, you just kind of refresh the tables again, and you have the latest picture of everything. So there are simple things like that as well that can help you track how you're doing in a very easy way. Kelsey Willock (22:48) You bring up a really hot topic, which is pay equity. What compensation and benefits trends do you think will shape the employee experience most over the next year? Ademar Martins (22:59) That's a good question. think one that I see, there are a couple that come to mind. I think one that I've, I definitely see growing more more relevant is just pay transparency. know, more and more locations within the U S more and more countries outside the U S are making pay transparency a mandate basically. Like you have to report certain details publicly, right? You have to publish certain details publicly like your ranges and things like that. ⁓ in some countries like the gender pay equity details. So I think an increase in pay transparency is where things are headed. I know historically some companies have chosen not to be super transparent, right? And I think that's going to become less and less possible to do with all these mandates, you know, from the government, from different governments, ⁓ really pushing companies to start sharing more than they have in the past. So think that's one. one trend that we'll continue. And I think another trend is just the growth of AI, right? And how AI will impact just supply and demand for different jobs, right? Some jobs may become hotter jobs that require a premium. Some jobs may become less relevant as we get into this new space of how is AI going to impact work? So I think that's one trend. AI is a trend that will impact how compensation looks in the near future. Kelsey Willock (24:28) Now, thanks so much for sharing that. I couldn't agree more. think that AI is eating the future as well as regulation changes. And many of those changes are happening for the good. It's for the better of employees. So tools, like you mentioned, Cindy, could be really impactful for folks if they aren't leveraging tools to help be more effective and pay transparency currently. Last question for you. What is a 30 day experiment our listeners could try to boost financial well-being or engagement at the companies that they work for? Ademar Martins (25:03) That's a great question. A couple of times that people have reached out to me for kind of advice on how do I invest, how do I get started. What I always tell them is what I'm going to tell your audience here is I would recommend starting by watching a show called Undercover Billionaire. I've only seen the first season of it, so I can't vouch for the other seasons. But the first season is a good place to start, I would say. Because the whole premise of the show is Kelsey Willock (25:23) Mmm. Ademar Martins (25:32) successful executive, right? He's a billionaire, right? He's placed in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Pennsylvania for 90 days. He's dropped off there. He doesn't know where he's going. He just finds out the day that he gets there and he's given a hundred dollars and a truck with a gas full of tank and that's it. You have a hundred dollars. You have a truck with the first full gas tank, right? ⁓ For the first time. Now in the next 90 days you have a challenge to turn that hundred dollars into a million dollar business. So the reason I recommend that show is because it can spark ideas. As you watch that show, think about yourself. See how he goes about it. He starts with pretty much nothing. He doesn't even have enough money for a hotel or for sleeping anywhere, an apartment or anything. That's where he starts. And he shows in that show that the American dream is very much alive. I'll give you kind of the spoiler, right? The spoiler is he turns $100 into more than $100 in a 90-day period. And you can watch the show to see how it all plays out. But the point for me is that you got to start where you are. Like I've had some people reach out to me and say, I'd like to invest in real estate. And I have, $5,000 or something like that. It's like, maybe real estate is not the place to start right away. Or at least not like ⁓ buying a whole house. There's other ways to invest in real estate, like maybe as a partner, as a part of something. Maybe that's where you can invest if you want to invest in real estate with $5,000. But maybe the way is to invest in other things first and kind of work your way up. Like you start with What can I invest with $5,000 to make that $5,000 grow into $10,000 in the near future? And then once I have $10,000, okay, now I have 10. What can I do now with $10,000 that I couldn't do with only five? And then it goes on from there. So yeah, won't give out too much details of the show, but I think it's a great, and it's not even a 30-day experiment because you can binge watch it. think it was maybe 10 episodes or something. So think 10 or 12 hours is probably enough for you to binge watch the whole thing and you'll come out of it inspired that the American dream is still possible. Kelsey Willock (27:54) I love that. I've actually been watching a show called Alone, which is they drop you off in the middle of nowhere with only 10 items and you have to survive off the land. there's so many parallels in those shows. I love that it's essentially an alone, but for business. So I'm definitely going give it a watch. Ademar Martins (27:59) Okay. Ooh. Yeah. He's got to worry about both because at first he's like, how am going to eat? know, before I before I create this million dollar business that I've been challenged to do, I got to eat and I got to find somewhere to sleep. I got to make enough money for that first, you know. So. Kelsey Willock (28:20) Great. Right? The basics. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I've learned so much from you. I think some of the key insights that I took away are that, you know, it's a real problem at organizations when communications breakdown. And so one great way to better understand if there is a comms breakdown is to share the messaging with someone that's completely outside of your organization. And if they don't get it, you need to come back to square one. Ademar Martins (28:55) You're not there yet. Kelsey Willock (28:56) You're not there yet. I also loved how you've mentioned some really important pay equity tools like Cindio, something that take it away. Look, if your organization is looking to find ways to keep pay fair and empowering. And then also be mindful that pay transparency is coming. It is becoming mandated. It is a regulatory requirement. So keep an eye on it as that is a major trend as we think about the employee experience to come. Really appreciate your time. Again, Atamar, if there's anywhere that our listeners can connect with you beyond this conversation, what's the best place? Ademar Martins (29:31) I think the easiest place would be LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn and happy to connect there. Kelsey Willock (29:36) Perfect. Well, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your afternoon and thank you so much for joining us. Ademar Martins (29:41) Thanks so much, Kelsey. Take care.