Learning the Rules to Break Them

Introduction: Nicole Miller is the Director of People at Buffer where she has worked for over 7 years. She is passionate about building a great workplace culture. In her spare time she writes novels and works on her farm. You can see the video of the full interview here.

Money for this interview was donated to the Transgender Education Network of Texas.

Jocelyn: Tell me about your path into HR, how did your career start and how did you get where you are today?

Nicole: Definitely. Thank you so much for having me and I’m always happy to tell farm stories cuz I think it actually fits into my background pretty well too. 

I did journalism, event planning, writing, and marketing at my previous career before joining Buffer. I was using Buffer as a tool for freelance marketing and just loved the tool. I had no idea about the business or what Buffer was as a company until I was upgrading one day to what was then called the Awesome Plan, which was the first step of the paid plan, and I saw that they were hiring and that they were a remote company. 

At the time I worked for a University and it was a more traditional workplace. I'd always been trying to work from home and they were never really open to it, but that was one of my main goals in my career because I had chickens and dogs and I just liked being at home. I was very productive and happy in that environment. I thought that freelancing or having my own business was the only way to do that. And that's why I was trying to promote myself through Buffer. 

And then as I was upgrading, I saw that they were hiring and that they were remote and I had no idea that companies would allow you to work from home. And so I threw my hat in the ring for a Community Manager role.

I started out customer focused, working on community efforts and launched a Twitter chat and eventually ended up hiring a couple other people to join the Community Team and Buffer grew pretty quickly over the first few years that I was here. Then, I helped come up with our family leave policy. I was one of the first people working at Buffer to take a family leave, to go have a baby.

My first dabble into HR was helping come up with that policy, which was a fun initiative. Once we started growing really large and kind of seeing that we needed a central HR department, I was brought up as a suggestion as someone who could help our People Team initiatives. I shifted my role from community to the People Team. I was learning on the job as far as researching and seeing what were best practice. I ended up doing an HR certification through SHRM and that was really enlightening. At Buffer, we always talk about how it's helpful to know the rules before you break them. 

Jocelyn: That's awesome. Well you're totally speaking my language with the chickens, cause I also have chickens. I'm not on a farm, but I also have a dog and cats, so I know what you mean about wanting to be home with the animals.

Nicole: Some people at Buffer travel the world and that's why they love remote work. And for me, it's that I love being able to do chores around my schedule, so I can feed the horses whenever I need to versus having to commute to an office and back. Or I can meet a vet during the middle of the day.

Compensation Transparency

Jocelyn: Awesome. Well, some people found Buffer through marketing, like you mentioned, cause that's what you all do. But if you're like me, I have found Buffer through the pay equity piece and that's how I learned about the organization. 

For people who don't know, Buffer has 100% pay transparency and it's not just internal within the company, it's actually published externally. 

What is it like working in an organization with 100% transparency? (See Buffer’s Salary Calculator Here)

Nicole: It was really novel at first and it was a little bit weird. I think for me when I joined so much of Buffer was very novel and strange compared to how I'd been working before. So it was lumped together for me. 

But it's been really great because it's very handy to have it all out on the table. With our hiring efforts to know what your pay range is before the conversation begins. It eliminates that sense of this job is out of what I wanna get paid. I don't need to have the conversation in the interview.

So that's been a really good thing overall, the conversation around equity and equal pay for equal work has been really good. It just sparks a lot of good conversations around why we do things which is helpful. It really does eliminate that sense of, I wonder if so and so is making more than me, instead you know, and you can have the conversation with your manager as to why or talk about your framework and your level and why you're an Engineer 2 versus an Engineer 3. 

It's prompted a lot of conversations around how we make career progression objective and fair, but also flexible enough to reward people for things that are outside of the framework. There's always things you can't anticipate and you want it to be objective enough, but also flexible enough to reward outside initiative or initiative beyond the scope of what we anticipated as being required or necessary. 

The other thing too is it's been helpful that we've had it for so long that it's baked into what it's like to work at Buffer. So there's not a lot of resistance to it once people get to the point of getting an offer from us.

Jocelyn: One of the things I hear from people when they're hesitant to move towards more transparency is that people will be upset or employees don't want their pay public. Do you ever have employees complain about the pay being public?

Nicole: There have been discussions around whether having your pay posted might mean that you get offered less at your next role where maybe they're not transparent and they do negotiate more. Especially with an area or department that's in high demand, like engineers. It's hard to know if that's the case but it has been a discussion that's come up. 

There are other discussions too, around security and people in areas that might feel unsafe having their salary transparent. In those cases we absolutely acknowledge that and are careful with not identifying our teammate. 

So there's always going to be a use case where there's people who aren't outwardly identified and don’t have their salaries shared transparently. But generally people see the big picture and like what we’re doing and why we're doing it. 

Jocelyn: Yeah. That's really interesting. I think those are examples that I wouldn't have specifically thought of. 

People Policy Experimentation

Jocelyn: I know Buffer's experimented with a lot of different People policies. Do you have a favorite and least favorite experiment?

Nicole: It's hard to say a least favorite. I think all of our experiments do play a role and some of them have failed, but that didn't necessarily mean I didn't like them. 

The one that comes to mind is that we did transparent feedback where we shared constructive criticism transparently as a company. And I liked the initiative and the fact that we tried it. But it did make some people uncomfortable. And so we learned really quickly that was a poor idea and not the best way to execute transparency. 

My favorite is Peer Masterminds, where we pair you with someone at your peer level who is from a different area or department than you. And the intention is to have a work friend or someone you can talk to about work stuff or life stuff, and coach each other through struggles or challenges. 

Some of these pairings that we've had have lasted for years, and even gone beyond tenures at Buffer. There's stories of mastermind buddies going to each other's weddings. I've had a couple different mastermind buddies personally at Buffer and one left the company but we've still chatted almost every other week for about 7 years now. 

Self-Managed Pay

Jocelyn: That's awesome. I know you had mentioned to me before about self-managed compensation and that was an experiment with your compensation practices that didn't really work that well. Can you tell me a little bit about it and why it didn't work?

Nicole: We went through a self-management phase at Buffer where there weren't any managers and it was a lot of “do the work that you think needs to be done and use the decision maker framework to communicate and execute on decision.” It was a fun, unique time at Buffer, but it felt a little chaotic. 

So the self-managed compensation came along the lines of, “why does the finance department dictate who makes what?” And I think the biggest learning we had from it was that was the reason for that is that finance as a department has a bit more context in using external benchmarks and having a history of our formula where it's predictable. Basing what someone makes on their role and seniority.

So all of that really came into play and I think it potentially could have worked. It was one of those things where it was very labor intensive and anytime we've tried to rethink or overhaul our salary framework it's very intensive. And maybe it wasn't accomplishing what we wanted it to accomplish. And that things were pretty stable and our formula and the salary was on par with where it should be objectively. 

It was an interesting experiment and we learned a lot. The whole idea of people selecting their own salary is pretty nuanced and kind of fraught with personal bias and lack of perspective.

Jocelyn: Did you find that people just pay themselves the highest that's within pay ranges. I always get people that say, people are always gonna ask for the highest amount. Did you find that was the case? Cause I actually don't think that's true.

Nicole: I'd have to go back and look at more of the documentation. But we do have a tendency to have a little bit of a problem with people being overly humble at Buffer where people don't speak up for themselves or let people know what they're doing. That's kind of a hard thing in remote work is that you don't know what people are really working on unless you're micromanaging or unless people speak up for themselves. Yeah. And so there's a little bit of coaching around knowing when and how to promote the work you're doing and communicating it to your  manager. 

Another parallel example is that generally we have a minimum time off requirement versus a maximum because we have an unlimited time off policy. And we found that people weren't taking a lot of time off in general. Having that blank slate was worse than a maximum. There's helpful components to having boundaries, whether that's a minimum or a maximum, or even a suggested amount of time off. So we changed from unlimited to at least three weeks, and I still have to go through and remind people at the end of the year that they haven't taken off three weeks I think it was a little bit of the same with self-managed salaries, where people were underestimating their value.

We talked at one point about everyone having the same pay. But recruiting for higher level positions comes into it. Lots of interesting things that spark really big conversations.

The Four Day Work Week

Jocelyn: That's fascinating. Buffer switched to a four day work week in 2020, tell me about that.

Nicole: We've always talked about a four day work week, but we really didn't give it an earnest try until May of 2020. That was because everyone was very stressed out and distracted, understandably because of the pandemic. 

We really tried to figure out what we could do to help our teammates. In survey, after survey, we heard that people wanted more time or work flexibility, better work life balance. We really thought this was the chance to do a four day work week and see what happens. 

We were already seeing a productivity dip just with being distracted and all of the chaos that was going on in the world at that time. We experimented with different phases of a one month trial and then tweaking schedules and which day off people had and going with a six month trial.

Then in 2021, we did a full year commitment to it. We were feeling good about it. We were where we wanted to be with productivity levels.

Location Based Pay

Jocelyn: That’s fun! What's next for Buffer in terms of pay practices? Do you have anything new and exciting coming down the line?

Nicole: One of the things we've been discussing a lot is what it takes to roll out eliminating cost of living bands. That's been a big topic, especially with a lot of companies going fully remote and hiring globally and paying everyone the same, like a San Francisco based wage, no matter where they live, because they're doing the same amount of work as someone who might live in San Francisco. It's a very hot topic in the tech industry right now. We want to talk about what the finances need to look like in order to get to that point and bring everyone up to that same cost of living band.

Jocelyn: That really is such a hot topic. And for the most part, I have very strong opinions on things like pay transparency and what companies should be doing around their pay practices. But location based pay I struggle with a little bit on what's the right answer. 

As I've thought about it more and more, I feel like we don't pay people for any other characteristic that have to do with something they chose. So someone choosing where they live, if you have kids, we don't pay you more because you have kids.

Nicole: Actually we do at Buffer.

Jocelyn: I didn’t realize that. Tell me more about that.

Nicole: I think a hot topic in and of itself is that we have a dependent grant, so it's not necessarily just for kids. We offer an additional $3,000 a year per person who is wholly dependent on your income. That definition's a little broad for us, if you have a parent who you pay for a lot of their expenses, then that is a dependent and they're dependent on your income. Or say a sibling who is dependent on you, then that counts as well. It's a caregiver stipend. We've had a lot of discussion around whether that is fair or not for someone who chooses not to have children.

Jocelyn: Yeah. It's such an interesting conversation, because what I was going to say is normally we don't pay people for having kids but you might have benefits that support those people. So having a child care stipend or you might have a gym benefit that people choose not to use. There's all these different pieces where this benefit or pay rewards certain people more. 

But I think it becomes the question for location based pay of are we paying for the product of the job or are we paying based on where they live? What I've heard people say, is if you don't look at cost of living, you're essentially giving someone a raise if they move. I think I could be swayed either way.

Nicole: I am with you too, I see both sides of the argument. At Buffer we try to be very generous and when you're paying based on San Francisco wages and most of your company is not in San Francisco, then there's still an element of where you’re being compensated very fairly. 

Jocelyn: But then you have to ask, “Does that become cost prohibitive for an employer?”

Nicole: Yeah. And that's a discussion for us too. We have to think about the overall health of the business itself. If we don't see enough growth to justify everyone going to the high cost of living band that's the argument then that it doesn't make sense.

Jocelyn: It's exciting that you're gonna be exploring it, so I will be watching to see how that goes. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been such a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot about your policies and different experiments.

To learn more about Nicole’s journey at Buffer, check out The 10 Questions I’ve Been Asked Most in 400+ Values Screening Interviews.