The past year has presented huge challenges, and also tremendous opportunity. As I look back over the last 12 months since the pandemic sent us all into our homes, I’m proud of the way our company pivoted so quickly to address the needs of our employees, customers, partners, and communities. Hard times reveal true character — and true culture.
My biggest takeaway is that we have an opportunity to create an even better work environment — one with more balance, increased productivity, and deeper equality. As we navigate this continued change, our North Star is our values, and one of our core values is equality. As part of this, we remain deeply committed to equal pay.
Today, we’ve completed our sixth annual equal pay assessment of our 57,000 employees — a process that is baked into our compensation planning process. Every year we conduct a pay audit we learn something new that helps us continue to improve upon our process. For example, as a high growth company, we continue to expand the business through new hires and acquisitions. When we bring on a new company, we inherit its talent, technology, culture, and its pay scales.
Since we started evaluating equal pay in 2015, we’ve iterated on our processes and broadened the scope of our assessment to address some of these factors. What started as an analysis of unexplained differences in base salary across gender globally, has expanded over the years to include gender globally, race and ethnicity in the U.S., bonuses, and promotions.
This year, we also began the process of incorporating stock grants into our assessment in order to have a more holistic picture of employee compensation. Our stock program is an important tool designed to reward and retain employees. We started by looking at eligibility for stock grants versus stock recipients, and did not find any unexplained differences among gender globally or race/ethnicity in the U.S.
Driving Increased Transparency
When it comes to matters of equality, it is important that we’re transparent in our efforts and hold ourselves accountable to our goals and progress. This year, in order to focus our equality efforts and drive transparency, we published new representation goals on our website, and we started publishing quarterly equality updates to report back on our progress.
And today for the first time, we published our equal pay strategy, so anyone can learn more about our pay philosophy and how we approach our assessment. One of the questions we receive the most from other companies and organizations is “how do you do it?” So our goal is to provide a playbook for other organizations looking to address equal pay within their own workforce. No company is immune from equal pay disparities, and it will take shared solutions and collaboration to tackle this issue for good.
Additional Findings
This year, our analysis found that 3.5% of our global employees required adjustments. Of those, 81% were based on gender, and 19% were based on race or ethnicity. As a result, we spent $3.8 million to address any unexplained differences in pay, a total of more than $16 million to date.
Progress is never linear, and each year presents unique challenges. For the first time, we included Tableau in our assessment — one of our largest acquisitions to date. This was also our largest year of growth, adding more than 16,000 employees.
As we look ahead to this year and beyond, we’re encouraged by the opportunity we have to scale and strengthen a more inclusive culture in this new digital work environment. Equal pay will continue to be a critical part of our equality strategy, but we recognize that equal pay alone is not enough. We’re working to increase equality throughout the employee experience by introducing new and expanded programs, policies, and benefits to ensure that all employees feel valued and empowered to succeed.
To learn more about our equality efforts, please visit Equality.com or read our most recent quarterly equality update.
