By Joel Gascoigne

I’m happy to share that we’ve established a long-term goal that salaries at Buffer will not be based on location. We made our first step towards this last year, when we moved from four cost-of-living based location bands for salaries to two bands. We did this by eliminating the lower two location bands.

The change we made resulted in salary increases for 55 of 85 team members, with the increase being on average $10,265. When the time is right, we will be eliminating the concept of cost-of-living based location bands entirely, which will lead to a simpler approach to providing generous, fair and transparent salaries at Buffer.

In this post I’m sharing my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.

Location and Salaries

It’s been interesting to see the conversation about location and salaries unfold both within Buffer and beyond. We’ve heard from many teammates over the years about the pros and cons of the location factor, and of course we’ve watched with interest as this became a regular topic of conversation within the larger remote work community.

I've had many healthy debates with other remote leaders, and there are arguments for eliminating a location component which I haven’t agreed with. I don’t believe pay differences across locations is unethical, and it has made a lot of sense for us in the past. However, the last few years have seen a lot of change for remote teams. A change like this isn't to be made lightly, and at our scale comes with considerations.

Our Compensation Philosophy

Compensation is always slowly evolving as companies and markets mature and change. We’ve been through several major iterations of our salary formula, and myriad small tweaks throughout the last 8 or so years since we launched the initial version. Part of the fun of having a salary formula is knowing that it’s never going to be “done.” Knowing that the iterations would continue, Caryn, our VP of Finance, and I worked together to establish our compensation philosophy and document our principles on compensation to help us determine what should always be true even as the salary formula changes over time.

We arrived at four principles that guide our decisions around compensation. We strive for Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits to be:

• Transparent
• Simple
• Fair
• Generous

These are the tenets that have guided us through compensation decisions over the years. After we articulated them as our compensation principles, we were able to look at the location factor of our formula with new clarity.

There are a few key considerations that were part of our discussions and my decision to put Buffer on a path towards removing our location factor from salaries that I'll go into more detail about next.

Transparency, Simplicity, and Trust

Our salary formula is one of the fundamental reasons that we can share our salaries transparently. Having a spreadsheet of team salaries is a huge step toward transparency, but true transparency is reached when …read more

Source:: Buffer Blog

Author: Aaron