[foundation-board] Modelling employment costs

Thu Sep 1 09:11:58 UTC 2011

On 31 August 2011 01:37, Jason Kitcat <jason.kitcat at okfn.org> wrote:
>
> On 30 Aug 2011, at 14:49, Becky Hogge wrote:
>> Are Employee NICs higher than NICs paid by self-employed people, or are you assuming that those who are currently
>> self-employed are not paying their voluntary NICs?
>
> Self employed NICs are lower than employee NICS is my understanding of the situation.
>
>>> Of course staff will have more rights like paid holiday, parental leave, sick pay etc which is hard to quantify - we currently have very low sickness absences and I don't see that changing. People work for OKF out of passion more than anything else!
>>>
>>> Most of ORG's staff, who are all salaried, are in the £30-37k range apart from one part-time finance person and one events person who is a first-jobber.
>>
>> Interesting - that's changed since my time (back then we lived in a
>> shoebox in the middle of the road, wrapped in newspaper, and we were
>> lucky for it etc). I don't want to take this part of the discussion
>> too far, as I said before, but aren't some of the folk on your list
>> also first jobbers?
>
> 1 or 2 perhaps. If we feel they are good and we want to keep them (it takes a lot of effort training, getting them up to speed) then a bit more pay is worth the long term pay-off vs constantly recruiting replacements. It's enough to stay on top of growing demand!

I agree with the need to value and retain good people. But I think
it's also the case that by setting salaries at this level, you are
setting them not only for the people you are employing now, but for
all the people you employ in the future, as significant salary
discrepancies between staff doing similar jobs are not good for
morale. Say you want to employ four entry-level people and you decide
to pay them 35K instead of 30K because you want them to stick with you
once you've trained them up. That's an extra 20K you've got to raise
each year - at least the surplus from a whole funded project, if not
more. These are the sorts of trade-offs we're looking at.

I'm actually going through this myself at the moment - a company I've
been contracting for for nearly two years at a nice juicy rate wants
to employ me, and although it's not been stated exactly how much, I
know this is going to mean a significant hit in my pocket. I'm
probably going to walk away, based on the fact that I don't see a
long-term future with that company and so don't want to take the hit.
I don't want to lose any of the people you've listed in the process of
moving them from contractors to staff - not a single one. And I'm also
not sure what we can offer them other than money and the thrill of
working for the OKF - certainly not job security, or that many perks.
So it's a difficult problem. Do other board members have views?

Becky