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For Melanie Naranjo, working in HR for a company that gets “the business case for HR” is a unique opportunity—one she highly recommends. She has been the VP of people for the compliance platform Ethena for the last two years. Naranjo has spearheaded the company’s pay transparency and pay enquiry priorities, and even rolled out a new no-negotiations policy. When Ethena makes a job offer, it’s final.
“We want to pay people for what we think they’re worth. We don’t want to pay people for how good they are at negotiating,” she told HR Brew.
Though the move seemed “risky and scary,” she has gotten positive feedback from employees and candidates alike. This way, candidates know to expect one well-informed and final offer from the jump, she said.
What’s the best change you’ve made at work?
The biggest change I’ve made at Ethena surrounds the work we’ve done around pay transparency. I’ve always been passionate about creating pay equity inside every place I’ve worked and knew that opening up the usually opaque conversation around salaries and career ladders could open up opportunities for a ton more people.
That’s why in April of 2022, we started including salary bands in all of our job descriptions, which was well before the bulk of pay transparency laws went into effect and it became a mainstream discussion.
In addition to simply disclosing salary ranges, I knew we needed to do more to create a truly transparent environment. That’s why I created clear processes, including checks and balances, to ensure consistency and accountability across salary bands. For example, we implemented a no-negotiation policy for offer letters, trained our managers on how to determine where someone falls along the salary band, and created an internal FAQ outlining how increases and promotions work, our company pay philosophy, how salary bands work, and more.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
One of the biggest misconceptions about people in HR is that we can do our work in a silo, but that’s a fallacy. There has to be company-wide alignment in everything we do in order to have maximum impact. How can you ensure employees are engaged if you’re not having regular conversations with employees and their managers? And how can there be company-wide alignment on cultural values if HR doesn’t have a seat at the leadership table? HR is the unsung glue that holds organizations together but all too often it goes unacknowledged.
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What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Being a part of history. The world we live in today is a very different world from the one we lived in just five years ago. In these last few years alone, we’ve normalized new, remote ways of working, we’ve paved the path for a future in which applying for a job without knowing the salary on offer will seem ludicrous, and we are consistently exploring new, more inclusive, agile, and efficient ways of working. Knowing that I’m helping create the kind of work norms I would have found enormous value in myself when I first entered the workforce as a first-generation professional—one that can help foster healthier, more inclusive opportunities for success for all employees—is just about the most inspiring thing I could think of.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
I’m personally optimistic about the new, more inclusive ways of measuring engagement that are shown to be increasingly effective. This includes examining things like performance and output, which issues are no longer cropping up, manager feedback, etc. Employee engagement strategies are most effective when they prioritize giving employees the flexibility to engage in the ways that feel most meaningful to them rather than pressuring everyone to have “fun” at work in the same way.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
While I’m really excited about the different use cases of AI in HR, I’m also a bit skeptical. AI is created by people with unconscious bias—as we all have—which means that this same unconscious bias is almost certain to creep into the AI functionality itself. In its current state, it’s unavoidable. So while I’m interested in what the future holds for this technology, I’m concerned about its rapid development and deployment and how that may negatively impact historically marginalized communities in the workplace.