How To Make Your Workplace Equitable Using Data
With Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio
Subscribe here
Hello hello, it’s Amar here, the host of EH podcast and Season 2 is officially underway!
Each week, I interview real experts about topics you need to know about.
Today is with Maria Colacurcio, the CEO of Syndio, the home of workplace equity who have raised over $50m.
We’re covering How To Make Your Workplace Equitable Using Data.
Next 3 weeks:
- Raz Golan (Co-Founder of Shopic) — How To Use AI To Disrupt Traditional Markets
- Tyler Denk (Founder of Beehiiv) — How To Grow Your Newsletter
- Sandhya Hegde (Partner at Unusual Ventures) How Generative AI Is Shaping SaaS
Listen to this episode
How To Make Your Workplace Equitable
Here are some of the key takeaways from the episode if you’re in a rush!
The Fatherhood Bonus
Once a woman has children, her colleagues, both men and women consider her to be less committed to her job. — Maria Colacurcio
Maria’s research has shown that men are often seen as more responsible after having children whereas women are looked at in a negative light which hits their earning potential.
Considering Maria has 5 children and now runs a 9-figure company, clearly mothers are highly capable in business. She believes the skills she learned while raising those children have made her a far better leader.
Discipline and Document
You can have reasons why you pay people different amounts as long as these are disciplined and documented.
Maria Colacurcio
Some people freak out about pay equity and think they have to pay everyone the same regardless of the skills or value they bring and that’s not the case at all.
Yet the only way to ensure there’s no bias in your decision making to have clear reasons why each was made. It could be based on tenure, performance or many other metrics.
Opportunity Equity
Equal pay for equal work. That has become table stakes. What we’re now looking at is opportunity equity. Are people having opportunities to move up? - Maria Colacurcio
What can happen at some companies is people are paid equally for doing the same roles but the demographics in each role contrast heavily. E.g. all the women and people of color have junior roles.
You want to be looking at how you analyze performance to see if there’s a pattern where people from certain demographics are often scored lower in specific areas which could be a by-product of bias.
Always communicate
Typically, they will make up a pay gap in their heads that’s 3 to 4x worse than what your pay gap actually is.
Maria Colacurcio
If you try to hide information, you often actually makes things worse. People will naturally assume the reality must be seriously bad otherwise you’d just share it.
Think about it in any area of life. The secrecy breeds lack of trust which triggers disloyalty and could mean high employee churn when the truth isn’t actually even so bad!
Beware of hiring through your network
So next thing you know you’ve got a company of 15 or 16 people and you’re completely homogenous
Maria Colacurcio
A key problem for early stage startups is hiring people you already know which can mean people like you. That then attracts more people like you. This can mean your company lacks diversity from the start and then needs to catch up.
It’s better to post positions and interview widely. This way you can get more variety in opinions which leads to better decisions.
We all know the startup graveyard is full of companies that hired friends who turned out to be less professional than the founder thought.
Want to appear on the podcast?
Our bar is high because we want our audience to get their advice from the best.
Meet one of these criteria? Reply to this email and tell us!
- For venture-backed businesses, we want valuations of $100m+.
- For LinkedIn/X creators, we want 100k+ followers.
- For VCs, we want partners with $1bn AUM.
- For bootstrapped founders, we want $1m MRR.
If you want us to get someone else on, tell us and we’ll try our best!
