 And I'm glad to be here for a second time. You have a really beautiful country and really great city, Bangalore. Today we'll talk about open salaries, an approach that we use in ScrumTrack for managed salaries and not only salaries, as we will see later. This will be an unusual case study because usually you see case studies from companies which are adopting modern management methods, improving their processes, changing their structure and doing different things. But today we'll talk about company which helps that we use companies on their journey. We will talk about Agile Consulting Company and what processes do we have in that company, okay? A few words about me just before we start. I am a managing partner and Agile coach at ScrumTrack and also I am a producer of two largest Agile conferences in Russia, Agile Days and Agile Business Conference. Just before we go into the details of processes that we use in ScrumTrack, that's our company, I must provide you some context about ScrumTrack. ScrumTrack was established in 2007 by three co-founders and now it's the largest Agile Consulting Company in Russia and I think one of the largest in Europe. We have over 40 employees, three dotted companies, several franchises around Russia and in nearest countries like Kazakhstan, for example. And by the way, we have an office in the center of Moscow because it's unusual for Agile Consulting Company to have an office. Usually they are really small, consisting only one or three people maximum. And this is a major part of our team. This photo was taken on our main Agile conference Agile Days. Usually it has over 1,500 participants. It's like Agile India, but in Russia. And I found interesting thing that we also organize it in World Trade Center, but in Moscow. We work with really large clients in Russia. It's three years ago, it was mostly IT companies and now it's a large manufacturing, financial and insurance companies. But three years ago, we were a really small company made up only of six people. And we had a really great informal and dynamic culture because the company was very small. But three years ago, we started to grow rapidly. Our staff increased by 12 people over three months and they were really outstanding people because we tried to hire only stars. Chief technology officers, high level managers who have a really deep experience in making changes in companies. And that was great, but it created some problems because it was comparatively easy to manage business when you have only six people. And now we have 18 outstanding people in our company, each one with unique management background and deep management experience. And there were a lot of questions at that point in time. For example, what will the motivation be for that people to stay in our company for several years? And how mass processes and structure looks like to make that people happy from the one side and to motivate them to develop our company, to create a profit from the other side. And of course, there's several options to do it. First is the simplest option. You can go classical way. You can structure your company as a hierarchy. You can split your company in departments, hire managers and do different things. But I can't imagine who can manage a group of stars. And what salary that person should have. I think it would be a very, very expensive person. And I believe if you started to manage people, it would affect your company dynamics and would decrease your self-management culture. And there is a second option. You can organize your company as a network. But it's a really hard way because there are few real cases in the world and there are lack of experience in that topic. But we didn't take an easy way, but we didn't take an easy way. And we decided to go on the second journey and by decentralizing our management function, by empowering our employees to manage our company. Easy to say, but hard to achieve. And we didn't know exactly what to do at that point in time. But we thought that if you want to manage something, you need information about what you want to manage. And if you want to empower your employees to manage your company, you need to provide them all information about your company. And of course, you need to provide them also financial information. And the most dangerous part to open is seller information. Why? Suppose you open sellers and what will the result be? I think it would look something like this. Yeah, yeah. Why? Why did that happen? If information is close to a people, there would be a lot of unfairness hidden in it, yeah? And for example, former employees usually earns lower salary than newcomers, especially in high tech industries. Is it true for a company? Yes. Yeah. How could we prevent this situation? We started to seek for case studies of companies which open salaries for their employees. And we found one real good case and I will provide you a link at the end of my talk to that case. It's really useful and it helped us a lot during our journey. What we decided to do in the practice? We decided to do two things. First, we decided to align seller expectations between our people. And second one, we decided to remove unfairness in salaries. What does it mean in the practice? First, of course, we discussed that ideas with our employees and got an agreement to go on our journey. And second one, we sent an email to each employee that contains such spreadsheet where all our employees listed all employees in our company are listed, okay? And in that spreadsheet, they need to provide their expectations about salaries of each employee or most part of employees in our company. After that step, chief executive officer aggregated that information and increased salaries for several people to meet expectations of their colleagues. For example, my salary was increased almost twice during that process. And I was really happy about this. Why did that happen? Because the most part of my colleagues thought that I earned two times higher than it really was. And we need to align that salary expectations. Of course, after that step, it was easy to open salary information to all people in our company. And there were no conflicts around that topic. But of course, the most storming part was ahead. And I'll talk a little bit later about that storming. But now I want to share you some of our tools which we are using in our company to manage that process. Here you can see open salaries trail abort which we are using to manage open salaries process. There are a lot of columns in that trail abort. First column contains rules and rules which we have in our company. Second column contains information about candidates which we want to hire about their salary expectations, about their skills and experience. Third column contains information about people who are on a trial pirate and of course about their salary, about their skills, experience and so on. Two next columns contains information about employees in our company. We have two types of employees. Classical employees and managing partners who are in profit sharing scheme. And also about their roles, their salary, their skills and different other things. Their plans to develop their self. And also we have several columns for salary increase requests and for firing process. Here you can see an example of employee card. This is my employee card. This is roles which I'm performing in our company there in Russian, by the way. Here you can see my salary level for some reasons. And here is a number of comments which are made during my salary increase request discussions in the company. And of course sometimes you not only want to see salary, you want to increase your salary for some reasons. Usually not decrease. And of course we introduced salary increase process. It's a really simple process with our roles for that process. At any point in time you can request a salary increase you can request a salary increase for yourself or your colleague. All you need to do, you need to provide an explanation. Why do you think you need a salary increase? And you must do it publicly using that trailer board which I showed some slides before. And everyone in the company can give you a feedback about your salary increase request. And it can be positive feedback or negative feedback. If somebody gives you a negative feedback, they need to provide some points or what you need to do or to improve to get that salary increase. They cannot say no, yeah, they need to provide some points. And the increase will be done if more than 50% of people in our company voted for and nobody voted against. And that process was really storming at the start. There are a lot of interesting things and problems happened during that process. For example, first thing that we encountered that it's difficult for several people to ask for salary increase by themselves because they used to a situation where their boss was responsible for managing their salary and now it's your responsibility to manage your salary. And it was a really difficult mindset change for that people. In such situations there are a lot of cases when one employee asked for salary increase for another employee. And there was one interesting case when that another employee refused a salary increase. He said, I don't need a salary increase right now. I want to finish some major activities and after that I will request a salary increase by myself. Another interesting thing that happened that several employees started to use that process as a feedback tool. They started to create salary increase requests not for salary increase right now but to get a feedback from their colleagues what they need to do or to improve to get a geometrical salary increase after one year, for example. And it was also interesting effect of that process. And the last thing that we didn't have any formal criteria for salary increase at the start and we don't have it right now. Such criteria are developed during salary increase request discussions. And it was a really hard discussions at the start. But as a result we have a situation where you need to do a really good job to a company or provide a really good service to your colleagues to get a salary increase. And I think it's a really great result. And what did we do next? As you remember, salaries was only a part of all information that we needed to provide to our employees. And at the next step we opened all financial information to our employees. At the start it was handmade reports which were sent monthly to all employees. They contained information about account balances, expenses, incomes and different other things. But after several months we developed simple application, automated report system. It's written in Google script and integrate information from different financial applications. And there you can find any information from different levels, from company level, from business line level, from personal level. And find any information you need, financial information you need about our company. Of course it's only open to internal employees. And after that step, of course, every employee in our company had all information that they need to have to make management decisions. And at the next step we introduced an advice process. It's a really simple and fast and distributed process for making management decisions. Here you can see simple rules of that process at any point in time. Everyone can implement and create any initiative that they want. For example, hire somebody, spend their time developing new product, buy something, attend a conference, do anything they want. But, and nobody can block your decision except chief financial officer. But where is one major rule? You need to get a feedback just before you start that initiative from several colleagues in your company, in our company. And you must do it publicly using special trailer board. We call it initiatives board. And after several months, after we had introduced that process, we had a really good dynamic in developing our company. But also we got some serious problems at the company level. For example, we hired four people just before low season and we got a cash gap for several months and it was really painful for our company, for all employees. And what do you think what we decided to do after we had that problems? No, we didn't decide to tighten the screws with the job. This situation forced us to improve informing to improve informing our people about current financial situation in our company, about forecasts and so on. And we developed several slackbots. We called it scrum track finance police. Do you use slack? Yeah, we have several slackbots which are weekly or on demand informing people about current financial situation, about forecast. This is an example of a message of such slackbots. It informs people about account balances, about receivables and about forecast of monthly expenses. And also it compares account balances with expenses. It provides a really good information about our current financial situation for people. And it helps them to analyze can they make, can they buy something? For example, certification for some trainings and different other things. And this step really helped us because the quality of decisions, of management decisions, raised. It was really helpful. And what do we have as a result of that crisis? Of our changes. We have over 14 employees in our company and no managers at all. Of course, we have chief executive officer, chief financial officer, but we see them as people which are creating an environment and infrastructure for other employees to perform their best. Only two employees left scrum track. In the past three years, I think it's really great result. We have developed more than 40 new customer products over two years. For example, new trainings, new digital services for agile teams and for customers, new conferences and different other things. And some of that products are conceptually new products for our market. For example, long-term education for product owners and scrum masters, online trainings, online platform for remote coaching and service for tracking metrics and doing strategic retrospectives for agile teams. And now we see scrum track as a platform for creative people to create something amazing and with sour idea, with sour mission. And one last thing that I believe that in the future when you will need only to press one button to change your job or to move to another, to different company, it will be very important to create a really great infrastructure, great environment, great culture in your company to motivate the people to stay in your company, develop your company. And that things will be very important. As I promised you, here's a link to a guide to open salaries. And if you decide to move on a journey, you can use it. It's really interesting, helpful and really detailed. That's all. Thank you. Any questions? Yeah. How do you think your salaries compares to that of the market? Is it almost all of them on the higher side? That's my question number one. Question number two is, did you have any trouble to deal with low performers? How did you manage low performers in your organization? First question. Our salaries usually not higher than the market. And it's interesting thing that people stay in our company because of really great culture. For example, we don't have any formal criteria for holidays. You can, for example, stay, you can rest for two months, for example, yeah? And nobody can say you nothing about it. But usually it tends to, for example, I work without any holidays, yeah. Yeah, because we have freedom in our company, people stay and our salaries are not higher than the market. Yeah, and second question. About low performance. Low performance, okay. Yeah. As I said, we have a firing process. In our firing process, everyone can initiate a process to remove a role from you. If you have no roles in our company, you will automatically go out, yeah. That's how it's happened. You mentioned that you have this recommendation system where more than 50% colleagues recommend certain hikes to certain people then. So how you manage this salary budget is because if many people recommend themselves and their colleagues and there are so many recommendations, then how you handle that doesn't affect your salary budgets. Who do you rephrase? I didn't answer. Let's say many people, so everyone recommends themselves and some colleagues, let's say, for salary hike. And so there are chances that everyone gets more than 50% recommendations or votes. You think that if you introduce that process, everyone can start raise their salaries, yeah? It's not happening in reality because usually there are one or two people which are not agreed with your request. And at the start, we did such thing that chief executive officer participated in that process and he can block your request but there was no example when he used that right to block any decision. Usually it's harder to get a salary increase when it's not easy. Oh, I forgot. So you mentioned that there are 40 plus employees in your organization. So do you know of any examples where there are, let's say, thousand plus employees and companies have done this? And also for yours, like your own company, when, at what scale do you see this tipping? If at all? It's interesting question. I don't know examples of companies which are using such scheme at the scale of 1,000 and more people. But I know such companies which are using such scheme at a scale of 200 people and it's software development companies. At that, my opinion that at the scale of 14 employees we found a problem that it's difficult for several people, especially newcomers to feel an impact of their actions on company metrics, business metrics. And it tends also to bad management decisions for that people. And six months ago we decided to do one more experiment. We decided to split our company into teams. But it's not a classical team as you can think. Team is a client-oriented cross-functional team with its own budget. It's like mini-company, yeah? Micro-company inside a big company. For example, we have five teams. Each team contains different people with, for example, agile coaching skills, product skills, engineering skills, back office, it's in the team. And every team has its own metrics, business metrics because it's client-oriented and it has its own budget. But also we have a special team that is called platform team. Is there any agile coaches here? Platform team is usually anti-pattern, yeah? It's a bad pattern to do. But we decided to do that team because there are a lot of services in our company which are centralized. For example, accountants marketing website management. And if we split that services to, if every team will have such service inside, it would be very expensive, yeah? But every team in our company pays some amount of money every month to that platform team. And that platform team is, we are clients of that platform team, yeah? As they know it. Yeah, where is the problem of the scale when you can't feel exactly an impact on business metrics? And as one of the solution for that problem is to split your company into several cross-functional client-oriented departments, teams, okay? Any questions, okay? Thank you.