Totally Rewarding Chats | Ep. 10: Chatting Pay Equity & Opportunity with the CEO of Syndio

Unpacking pay equity and transparency with Maria Colacurcio

Join Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, and Sean Luitjens in a conversation about pay equity and transparency in today's workplace. They discuss why pay transparency is more than just a trend, with increasing state mandates for companies to disclose pay ranges. They also chat about pay equity, understanding the principles of equal pay for equal work, and how organizations can analyze promotions and performance for bias. Maria emphasizes the necessity of addressing pay disparities and crafting fair pay policies, while also illustrating how technology is revolutionizing decision-making and communication about compensation.

In this episode:

• Host, Sean Luitjens, General Manager of Compensation Benchmarks, Visier

• Guest, Maria Colacurcio, CEO, Syndio

Episode transcript:

Sean Luitjens
All right. It is another totally rewarding chat and I am stoked to talk about pay equity. I have been on the soapbox for many, many weeks. And so we are going to level up and we are going to talk with Maria Colacurcio. Did I get that right? Right. CEO of Syndio. So can you start with, just so I don't butcher people's backgrounds, can you give us your elevator pitch and we will give you many floors. So when you're a CEO, you get a many floor elevator ride on your pitch.

Maria Colacurcio
You did, nice work. Amazing. I don't even think I need that many floors. So as you said, I'm the CEO of Syndio We are a enterprise B2B software platform. So that means we sell to businesses. We are a business selling to businesses, hence the B2B. And we sell a workplace equity analytics platform. So what that means is our customers leverage our software to identify any pay or opportunity gaps and then fix them.

So use the software to find them, fix them, and then prevent them from happening in the future.

Sean Luitjens
So that was very short. How did you get there? So I'm gonna go just to prove that you're human and you didn't start your career as CEO, just ask before we even get going the follow-up question, like give us the little bit of background of how you ended up where you are.

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, of course. So I had a very nonlinear career path, which I think is true more and more as we get into 2024 and the post-COVID era. But but also before, I think in particular for women, there's a lot of nonlinear career paths and those stories aren't being told as much, but they're starting to be told more, which I love. And there's a couple of software platforms that are out there helping women tell these stories. So I started out actually as a history and poli sci major, and I went to college on music scholarships. So I studied

opera. So that's kind of a little known fact that people don't know about me. My first job other than waitressing was in the Smithsonian in the Natural Museum of American History and not natural. Sorry, I'm mixing to the National Museum of American History and I work there for free and I waitress at night in DC and I loved it. I wanted to be a curator. So my career took a very, very sharp turn when I met a woman at a dinner.

This was sort of during the 1999, 2000, 2001. And she said, you've got to move to Silicon Valley. There's some crazy things going on there, this whole tech thing. I was a history major. I worked in a museum. I knew nothing about technology, but I figured why not? And so I flew to San Jose and I interviewed for a job in marketing at a startup tech company and I got it. And I loved it.

And I think part of why I loved it is because I served in marketing and communications as kind of the translator between the deep tech folks and the customer and the prospect and telling the story and product marketing became sort of my first love. So from there, I worked at startups. I moved back home to Seattle. I worked at Microsoft. I worked at a CRM company. And then I had the great fortune of co -founding a company called Smartsheet with three other people that went public in 2018.

After that, I did a stint at Starbucks. So I went to Starbucks HQ. There were a bunch of reasons for that, both personal and professional. I had had five kids. I had taken some time off to be at home with them, had them all within four years, went through a divorce, kind of had to redefine myself personally and professionally. And I thought, I've been selling software to businesses for so long, big enterprise companies, but I've never worked at one other than Microsoft. And Starbucks is iconic. The brand is amazing.

Howard Schultz is like the de facto communicator. And I thought, what a huge honor and privilege to be able to learn from him. So I did that for about four years before the Sindio opportunity came my way. And I've been doing this for about six years now. So, you know, probably not enough for you.

Sean Luitjens (03:53.998)
Okay, that's what I was looking for. See, I knew, I knew, I knew there was a bunch to the story. I mean, I didn't know that I didn't know the opera and the, I think that's pretty common, the nonlinear piece and kind of learning and I know we'll talk about it later. But one of the big things I talk about a lot in Total Rewards is translating comp and bend and Total Rewards to normal humans. And so I think that's great and we will park for another day, the five kids. We have three and people think we're crazy. So the five, we'll just leave that for another day.

Maria Colacurcio (04:29.342)
we can leave it for another day because I added two since then. So I have a total of seven, which is a bit of a mind blower for folks, but it's crazy chaos and I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Sean Luitjens (04:37.902)
Yeah, we're kind of at the tail end. So not that we would take any extra on, but like there are days we miss it, but there are days that were like kind of nice, but then we can call them up and now they're adulting. So what do you do for fun or hobbies outside? Although you have seven kids, so any extra hobbies you're doing now, I'm going to be super impressed.

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah. So I do have a hobby and it's turned into a hobby over the past two years. So my husband is a small business owner. He owns a gym in Seattle and we've gotten into these crazy fitness competitions. So we compete, they're called high rocks and my kids and kids of my friends who do this sport, say if you have to spell it, it's not really a sport, but you have to spell it. It's H -Y -R -O -X. And it's this sort of fitness competition where you run and you don't do all these stations. And I have to say,

For folks who have been doing fitness but used to compete, it's this really incredible resurgence of that competitive DNA that you have inside yourself to be able to compete again as an adult. It's just a really fun thing. Because all of a sudden, this training that you're doing, the fitness, the exercise isn't just about your mental health and your well -being, all very important, but you kind of have this goal, this target. And so it's been a really fun couple of years with that hobby.

Sean Luitjens (06:01.134)
So we will have to park that one because that's a whole nother thing. I'm a very avid outdoors person triathlete thing. And so a whole nother potential, depending how awful you find this today, another session on how you find time for all that stuff. Cause people ask me that all the time and that's interesting. So we'll get to the actual part of why I asked you to come on board. So really from a pay equity standpoint, transparency.

We'll start with a 30,000 foot of, you know, give us your, your statement on how you differentiate pay equity and pay transparency and why each one's important.

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, of course. So I think pay transparency is a really hot topic. So a couple of years ago, Colorado was the first state to introduce this law that sounds very simple at its surface. The law was for every new job that you advertise or post, you have to include a good faith range for what the job will pay. Seems very simple. Job, what's it gonna pay?

And what's happened over the last couple of years is those laws have accelerated amongst states to the degree that over a third of workers are now covered by some sort of pay transparency legislation. And the laws all look a little bit different. So for example, Washington state, it's not just base pay. You also have to include benefits and sort of a summary of what are the benefits in total compensation. Michigan has a law in the books right now. It hasn't passed yet that includes something called right to information, which means an employee could ask and be required to receive a look at comparative pay.

So if they wanna know what does Bob make, who's doing the same job as me, maybe a different gender, they have to on the spot, they have the right to information to get that. So they're taking on all sorts of different flavors. And then now after a decade of debate, the EU has passed their Directive on Pay Transparency, which requires all 27 jurisdictions of the EU to also have these disclosures around unadjusted pay gap, comparable pay, things of that nature.

So that is kind of the pay transparency journey in a nutshell. And I think what's really interesting about this for total rewards professionals, but also for CHROs, is that companies aren't necessarily ready to articulate why we're paid what we're paid. Companies can certainly articulate a range. And so I don't think the creation of the disclosed range has been as much of an issue.

But what that does is it creates and cracks open this nut whereby now that candidates know the range, now that internal employees are seeing the range for new hires, questions start to arise. Well, why is the range that way? Why am I in the bottom of the range? What does it take to get from the middle to the high end of the range? Why is this person coming in at the high end of the range? So lots and lots of questions that are being attached to pay transparency as a journey. Now, to answer your question directly, so that's pay transparency.

Sean Luitjens
On that one, before we go, when you say they're not ready, so they're not ready from that standpoint, but Colorado in particular now is going to be asking about career frameworks, right? And so the complexity, right? I mean, what percentage of companies do you think are ready with a career framework that is actually legally defensible to slot people correctly to deal with pay transparency, right?

Maria Colacurcio
It can, it's not just career frameworks, it's career progression. It's why and how are people being promoted? How can you articulate to folks the way that they also follow that promotion trajectory and path based on what level they're in to get to the next level and how do you communicate out the scope of the next three levels for people? It's incredibly complex and I think the way...

Leveling and job architectures have been created in the past. They were never really intended to see the light of day They were sort of created as a structure and framework that Informed job leveling job architecture, however, you want to describe it, but they weren't intended themselves to be made public and So I think we're having to really go back and think about leveling career progression Promotions analyzing promotions looking at performance and potential ratings. All of these things are now wide open and we have to be able to explain the foundation and what goes into the thinking to come out with the outcomes that we come up with.

Sean Luitjens
Yeah, which I think is interesting. And I'll now segue to pay equity because I think performance, you know, has its bias, you know, dig into that. But so how do you then define pay equity and the issues that are immediate to companies there?

Maria Colacurcio
Sure, so our software really has two sides to what we do. One is pay equity. So looking at like for like. So when you think about what pay equity means, it's looking at a group of folks that are doing the same work and identifying are there disparities because of something like gender, race, or ethnicity. So it's like for like. So that's where the phrase equal pay for equal work comes in. You're looking at people doing similar jobs and identifying are there disparities because of something like gender, also extending to race and ethnicity, which most companies are looking at now when they do a pay equity analysis with us.

They're extending that beyond just gender and looking at race. When you look at the other side of it, it's what we call opportunity equity. So that's analyzing promotions. Do you have broken rungs? Do you have glass ceilings in certain functions? And extending that also to analyzing performance and potential ratings. Are there statistically significant gaps in how certain groups are measured on performance than others, because a lot of times it's those potential ratings or performance ratings that are the key indicator as to how or why someone gets promoted.

So if you have bias that's been creeping in via discretion to those things, you can start to see that sort of circularly impact your promotion rate. So it's really two sides. It's equal pay for equal work. And then what we call opportunity equity, which means, do folks have a fair shot at opportunities to advance, to move up the ladder?

Sean Luitjens (12:11.022)
That's a really good way of phrasing it. The equal pay for equal work I've used a lot. I have not used the equal opportunity side of it. For me, the pay for performance one is always interesting, right? Because the assumption is then that there was no bias in the performance rankings. So how do you see companies tackling that issue, right? Because the assumption in my mind has been you get the same performance, you know, the performance rating comes in and then you look and say, how were people compensated or how did the comp planning process treat people that were given these ratings and was the manager discretion used in a biased fashion? But how do you inform companies or ask companies to handle non -bias in the performance rating?

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, I'll just tell you a quick story from one of our customers, because I think it's a pretty common scenario. So this particular customer had done pay equity analyses with us using our software. So they had identified where they had disparities. They had fixed the policies and underlying behaviors. They fixed their why they pay what they pay. So in terms of policies, they said they were paid for performance. But initially, upon reflection, they weren't actually paid for performance. So how do you then address that at the root cause?

They also had a survey from an employee engagement survey result coming in that there was a particular group of women, particularly black women in this case, in the engineering part of the organization that were feeling like promotions weren't fair. And so they used our software to analyze promotions to see, do we have gaps? Do we have predicted movement or advancement that's actually not working as we would expect using numbers, using math?

They actually didn't see any reflection of bias in promotions after analysis. So then they said, okay, but there's one more thing we really have to look at because the promotions look fair, there's no issue there. However, what plays into performance? It was the reviews, it was performance reviews and the potential reviews in particular. So when they went to go analyze the reviews, they did find there was bias creeping into reviews in particular around performance and how people were being rated on performance. And in that case, it was actually a broader gender issue. So women were consistently being rated as having less potential than men, which was then playing into the promotions.

So it's always kind of a multifaceted click, double click, triple click to make sure that you're using analytics to identify where the more discretion you have, the more bias is going to creep in. That's just human nature that's the way it works and so identifying those areas where you may have a lot of discretion and leveraging analytics to identify Has bias creeped in and can we can we fix that?

Sean Luitjens
Yeah. Unbridled management discretion is the bane of all, right? Is that as they go. So how, how, as you talk about all this, how have you best seen companies able to get started kind of down the process? Because when you hear about pay transparency and pay equity and all the issues and starting to dig in and then, you know, you can always freak them out with a multivariate regression analysis and all the things that might have to happen. How, how do you help companies, particularly small midsize where resources are a little bit limited?

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, I think what's interesting is there's this metric emerging that is starting to become sort of the North Star metric as to whether a company values their people without bias for the contributions that they're bringing, which is what all employees want and what ultimately plays into whether you are regarded as an employer of choice, which I would argue in this era of transparency is even more difficult to become and stay an employer of choice.

We all know being an employer of choice, great place to work, however you want to describe it, has a ton of financial benefits. Those companies tend to outperform their peers, their competitive set, by a wide margin because they keep their employees, they have lower onboarding costs, they're not churning folks out, they have lower attrition. So what we see from that perspective is that this unadjusted gap is a metric that is really surfacing as the North Star as to whether a company is doing this well. And the reason is because your unadjusted pay gap, it's called unadjusted pay gap, but it's not really about pay. It's a combination of those factors. It's about pay equity, equal pay for equal work, as well as advancement, which is that mean median, that average, are all your men up here and all your women down here.

That plays into the unadjusted gap. So the companies that are successful, they start with one thing and then they move from one thing, identify where the root cause of the problem is, whether it's policy behavior problem, maybe you're not getting the right ranges into the hands of the front line. So you fix your pay equity, but it's kind of like whack -a -mole in that you're going back every year and fixing it again and again, because you're not preventing it by getting the decision makers the right ranges so they maintain pay equity over time.

So it's kind of like you start by doing analysis, not just doing it once a year, identifying root cause. So what are the policies and behaviors driving those issues? Can we fix them at the organization level? Then you have to get preventative. How do we get ranges into the hands of the frontline decision makers so they can be hiring or promoting folks in at a range that's not just competitive with the market, but also fair internally.

And then moving beyond that to look at advancement, internal mobility, movement, looking at those ratings, how people are actually measured and moving up in the organization. That's kind of the path that we see that is the least taxing for companies of the size that you described, but also gets you through all of the phases in a way that prevents issues from coming back over and over again.

Sean Luitjens (18:05.614)
So that sounds like a very consulting answer, right? So that's the rainbows, unicorns, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So what have you seen as the biggest challenges as companies try to get themselves there and get started? Usually what I tell people, you know, because the fix is money, you know, at some level for pay equity. I haven't seen, maybe you can tell me, no one has moved anyone backwards, right? And said, oh, there's a pay equity issue. We'll move other people down to catch up. It's only moving people up.

So what have you seen from the biggest challenges?

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, I think in the old days it was a consulting model. So when we first started out in 2017, almost all of our customers were moving to us, to a software platform from either a big consulting firm or a law firm. And so they were really used to that sort of bill by the hour, white glove service, sort of outsourcing it all and just getting back a recommendation of who to pay how much, but they weren't getting that deeper understanding of why. They weren't getting the insights around the policies. So I do think the reason software is so much better to solve this problem is because you get to the root cause and you ultimately get to a point of prevention. So you're not doing that pay out of pocket to fix the problems over and over and over again. You ultimately get to a place where you don't have to remediate at all. You're preventing new problems from popping up. But I do think the place to start,

You've got to start with pay equity. You've got to start with, do I have pay disparities in people doing similar jobs that are because of something like gender or race? If you're not addressing that, I think it's in question if you have open headcount, but you're not addressing fair pay, should you even really be putting dollars toward that open headcount? I mean, that's kind of my provocative way of talking to companies when they're like, well, we don't have the budget for this. We can't prioritize this. It's like, really, you can't prioritize making sure you're not paying someone less because of gender or race, but you can afford to go hire a bunch more engineers. Like that feels a little bit inauthentic to me.

Sean Luitjens
I'll push back because I'm usually the equal pay for equal whatever, but paying for the proper pay rate, because I've been beaten up on other podcasts where I've been the guest, where I basically have said, I think most people want to be good payers. I think fundamentally most humans want to do the right thing. Money gets in the way, but paying people the right amount and fixing that problem doesn't add throughput in the business.

And so how do you see HR, whomever is dealing with the pay equity, the CFO, how do you see them building that business case other than it's the right thing to do? Or is it the, we might get the legal aspect. We don't want to be legal precedents in the state we're in. Or how do you see them traversing that? Because I can see the first pushback being, well, that may be true and I understand it and that's what I'd love to do, but I actually need two butts in these chairs to produce this kind of output to drive revenue.

Maria Colacurcio
I think there's two really strong answers to that. So number one, there's two sides of this conversation. There's what's fair to the employee and what's fair to the employer. So one of the amazing things that happens when you use software and innovation to address these issues is that you identify where you're not being fair to the employee because of race, gender, whatever. But what you also discover is where as an employer, you're not paying for the things that really matter to the business and drive business throughput.

So when we talk about looking at pay policies and identifying the non -economic forms of how to drive to fairness, it really does produce a benefit for both sides because CHROs today are under tremendous pressure. There's all the transparency that we talked about. Employees want to know that they're being valued. They want to know that the company is fair, committed to fair pay and things like that. But they also have to be extremely efficient with their compensation dollars. Mid -level manager layers are being wiped out.

They want to be able to articulate that the company cares about performance and our highest performing employees are actually the ones that are making the most and we can prove it through these pay policy analytics. So I think that's the other side of it is showing a company through analytics that yes, you're paying fairly, you can go talk about that. You can make sure your employees feel valued, that they stay, that you don't have high attrition, that you're able to be an employer of choice because of that.

But also what you're going to get is you're going to get key indicators around the policies. You're actually paying for the policies that matter to the business. And that's the second part that really does have a strong ROI because most companies do not deeply understand and know that the things that matter to the business are actually the things that are being rewarded through their total reward strategy.

Sean Luitjens
That's great. So usually I ask the last series of questions to be, how do you see technology play in the space? But I'm actually, I know how you think technology plays in the space. Knowing with technology like yours, what homework or things do companies need to have in place? Job grading comes to my mind, you know, kind of instantly. What other things do you think companies have to prioritize before they put the technology in place to make sure that the technology does what it's supposed to do?

Maria Colacurcio
I think companies need to have a really clear idea that is aligned with their leadership team all the way up through the CFO and CEO. Why do they pay what they pay? What do they value? And a lot of companies will say, oh, well, we're pay for performance. Are you? Because a lot of companies say they are, but when you analyze the pay and the rewards and you look at them through the lens of analytics, they're actually not. Performance isn't correlated to pay.

And in many situations that we see, companies actually are pay for negotiation because what happens is those one -off situations where someone negotiates or someone is going to leave and if they don't get XYZ and comp and so you pay them or they're a shiny snowflake and they're the exception. So you raise their pay. It's all these like mini exceptions that create the overall philosophy. And so I think number one, get with your leadership team, get with your CHRO and your CEO and your CFO and identify what are the things that matter to us? What are the policies that we actually want to incent, to reward in our company and start there?

Sean Luitjens
So do you give, not push back, but discuss how much manager discretion do you think companies should give? Because there's always that line of, you know, this is the way you do it. Your discretion is your pay for performance, your performance rating. Do you allow them to move the needle up and down and to fix issues, you know, kind of, or fix or adjust on the fly? Or do you basically, to your point, start at a senior level and push that down and that's the rules they play by?

Maria Colacurcio
I think there's always going to be manager discretion. That's part of being a people leader is, is that you have some of that discretion. To me, I think the role of technology is to guide the discretion in the moment when those decisions are being made. Because it's those individual moments over time that create the rules, that create the models, that create the pay practices and philosophies. So if you have technology in the hands of the frontline to guide those decisions in the moment with recommendations, I think you're going to stay a lot closer to the pin in terms of where you ultimately end up because now they've got that recommended range. It's almost like somebody's watching, but you still have that decision-making autonomy and that discretion, but you've got that ability to have the decision guided.

Sean Luitjens
That's interesting because tying it all the way back to the very beginning, you're basically talking about taking something very complicated, very comp centric, where you've got a lot of comp language and other things and somehow allowing the hiring manager to see and communicate that in normal human language to see it make that decision on the fly. Do I make something or not without being a comp expert?

So your whole background of moving from product marketing and tying it back from tech to English, that communication thing I think is really critical. I think that's where the piece, I don't know about you, but I think that's the hardest part right now is if you can give them this piece, all this guidance and give them the talk track to talk to people, I think it'll be a lot easier.

Maria Colacurcio
Yeah, I think it's going to become a non -negotiable because candidates are coming to the table with so much information. And so if your recruiters, hiring managers, people managers, when they're making a promotion, aren't able to articulate the policies that are driving that offer, that range, it's going to be very difficult for that person to have the confidence to have the conversation in a way that builds trust and companies need to build trust from the very first interaction with the candidate.

And so if that person does come to the table with confidence around the range and the why and the ability to answer the questions with even just a few points that play into the narrative of the overall philosophy of the company, that's gonna start to build confidence from the very first interaction.

Sean Luitjens
That's awesome. So the last thing, do you have any kind of last words, guiding way to wrap up kind of all of this together for those trying to tackle all of this, especially those trying to tackle it for the first time?

Maria Colacurcio
I think, don't panic. One of the things that I say all the time is to companies, it should come as a relief to you to know that when you lift the hood on a car that you haven't maintained, you're going to find some rest, you're going to find some problems. But the whole point is to start working against that maintenance to the point where ultimately you get that thing running, it's running well, you're doing the preventative care that you don't have to constantly be taking it into the shop.

Sean Luitjens
Thank you.

Maria Colacurcio
So I just, I always like to impart upon companies that you're going to find problems. If you haven't been doing this work, you will find problems, but that shouldn't scare you away from doing the work because ultimately if you start to do the work, you're going to reduce the amount of work you have over time.

Sean Luitjens
That's great advice because I've been telling people, you know, there's going to become a point the ostrich method doesn't work, which is kind of what's been going on. And so I think that's right. You know, don't be so scared to pull your head out of the sand. It's it's you're not going to be the outlier if you find issues. That's just the way it's happened. This has been great. So thanks so much for coming on. This is great for those that are watching and listening.

We will have Maria's information there. If you can spell, uh, Colo Curcio, then you will be able to find her or on Sindio. Um, and if you have questions, I'm sure you can reach out. Thanks so much.

Maria Colacurcio
Thank you for having me.