Business

Why This Dating App Is Paying All Employees an $80,000 Minimum Salary

It is an app for dating that places being progressive at its core. Ana, the chief executive of Feeld. Kirova, that’s an approach she aims to bring to the way the business values its employees.

The company, which offers users a range of flexible options and started out as an app for non-monogamous relationships, today announced that it was setting a new minimum annual salary of £60,000 ($80,000) for full-time employees. The new minimum pay means 40% of Feeld’s 55 full-time staff will receive a pay rise starting in January. Rest of the employees earn more than this.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“We put the human first, both as a company and for our customers,” Kirova tells TIME in an interview over Zoom. She noticed after a wave of hires that certain employees would be paid the market rate, which meant that salaries could not go beyond a set level. “It just didn’t make sense for us to take that information and not do anything about it.” she says. “As an organization, being fluid and progressive allows people to do their best work.”

Gravity payments, an online credit card processor startup, made the same decision. The minimum wage has been raised from $70,000 to $70,000 as of April 2015.. Feeld’s move also comes against the backdrop of a significant shift within the labor market. Dubbed the ‘great resignation,’ In droves, workers quit their jobs.. According to APRIL, a record number of Americans left their jobs in September. ReportThe Bureau of Labor Statistics released the November 12th data, which was the highest since 2000 when the agency began tracking these data. For every seven jobless people, around 10 jobs were available in the same month.. Employees have the power to ask for better wages, perks and working conditions by potential employers because of their high demand.

In thYou can also visit e U.K., where Feeld is based—although it allows staff to work remotely from anywhere—resignations and job-to-job moves are at the The highest in 20 years. In July-September, nearly 400k workers left the company, while 105,000 did so last year.

While Kirova recognizes the benefit of high starting salaries in attracting talent, she says the reason for the company’s decision was more about its “core value: being human.”

Kirova won’t be the CEO of Gravity Payments like Dan Price. Take a pay cutTo fund the minimum wage increase. That’s because the raises can be comfortably funded using the company’s profits, she says.

“We’ve been profitable for the last few years,” she said without disclosing the company’s profit figures. “We’ve seen a lot of growth and success, and we want to make sure that we reward everyone for it, because it’s not like it’s one person’s success. Everyone’s contributed to it.”

However, executives will earn substantially more than employees. Executives will still earn significantly more than other employees if they take into consideration the $80,000 salary base and any new recruits for top positions. Kirova asserts that level will earn six times minimum salary.

“We’ve never really had that vast gap between the top paid person and the lowest paid,” she says. “I think that this is to a large degree thanks to our transparent salaries policy, because it just keeps you accountable as a leader.”

Kirova declined to disclose the company’s annual revenue or total number of users but a company representative said there had been a 70 percent year-on-year growth in users between October 2020 and October 2021 The New York Times reported It was downloaded over 1.5 million times2016 It was launched in 2016.

Dimo Trifonov, the app’s founder—and Kirova’s partner—originally came up with the idea for Feeld in 2014, when she asked if him they could experiment with additional people in their relationship. The app, originally called 3nder was created for couples to set up joint accounts. The app has expanded to accommodate anyone who wants to explore dating. You can choose from more than 20 different options regarding gender identity or sexuality.

Kirova was hired to manage the products in 2016. She was named CEO in April 2017. She has built a team that includes 60% of female-identifying employees since then. The company claims that increasing the minimum wage from $80,000 to $80,000 will decrease the amount of the wages. gender pay gapBetween men and women at Feeld from 1% to 6%

“As a leader of an organisation and especially with our transparency, you can see patterns that are systemic,” Kirova says of the pay gap. “They’re not our doing. But if we don’t do something against them, they will just creep in as we grow.”

She says that the company hopes to close the remaining 11% gap in pay, but it will only do so once the root causes have been established. “Does this 1% also come from the wider market? Or does it come from internal bias that we’ll need to address?”

Kirova says she did not discuss the wage increase with the company’s sole investor, whose identity she declined to reveal, but says “he has a lot of faith in and trust in how we work.”

“We’ve previously made decisions that could look unpopular from an investor perspective,” she says, such as investing heavily in “design and creative work” and implementing salary transparency.

“These are not necessarily popular decisions, because they’re not tested and proven. But Feeld has always been very creative about how we do our work, and what exactly we do,” Kirova says. “And I believe we have the trust of our investor.”

Kirova is hopeful that other startup founders will follow her lead by increasing the minimum wage, in addition to improving equality between the different genders and roles within the company. “It’s very important for us to stay progressive, but also to inspire other companies to think a little bit more creatively about how exactly they conduct their business internally.”

Kirova is a firm believer that investing in employees will increase productivity. “In industries which are trying to reinvent or to innovate how work happens, there needs to be a path for people to see how they can succeed and grow.” She says it is counterproductive to creat gaps between how different roles are valued within an organization. The example she gives is the engineering position, which can often be more lucrative than any other job in a startup. “It has to be bridged. It can’t stay like this forever.”

Tags

Related Articles

Back to top button