Leveling the Paying Field

A Groundbreaking Approach to Achieving Fair Pay

Rick Gillis

• Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781950906970
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

"An infectiously evenhanded, useful approach to assessing fairer pay." — Kirkus "How much are you worth? Rick Gillis brings science to the art of getting paid fairly at work." — Adrian Gostick & Chester Elton, Best Selling Authors |The Carrot Principle, Leading With Gratitude&Anxiety At Work Leveling the Paying Field offers anyone who takes home a paycheck, seeking a new job opportunity, or carving out their own career path the opportunity to take pay parity into their own hands. Several books exist on the topic of fair pay, but none offers an individual approach to achieving fair pay like Leveling the Paying Field. In his latest book, author Rick Gillis has created a rich new metric for measuring the value of the work you produce he calls the QTNT® (pronounced: 'quotient'). Your QTNT score can then be used to reasonably and realistically challenge your current rate of pay. Not only can equal pay for equal work ultimately be realized, but even better, proper pay for outstanding performance becomes the new normal. "This is an important book - for job seekers and hiring managers alike." — Hung Lee, Curator & Editor | RecruitingBrainfood.com "...in clear and concise steps, he has dispelled any uncertainty of exactly how to level up and get paid what you are worth." — Alisa Murray, Award winning Columnist and Content Creator | Living the Sweet Life "In Leveling the Paying Field Rick Gillis has brought his lifetime of career management experience to solving one of the hardest aspects of compensation and negotiation: quantifying performance and
value fairly and accurately, regardless of role or gender... His 'quotient' will work for everyone…" — Lisa Gates, Negotiation & Career Story Coach | StoryHappensHere.com

1

The Quotient: A Very Simple Idea

A CEO is asked how many people work for him and he says, “About half.” If this joke is funny to you, you probably don’t manage people. The problem, universal to all owners and managers, is, Which half is doing the work? The answer to this question is not always as clear as one may think, especially when considering the many layers of management an organization may sustain. Leveling the Paying Field will sort all of this out for you.

* * *

To be competitive, a company must hire the best people available and pay them well in anticipation of getting the most value it can from each worker. The next hurdle is to be able to objectively measure every employee’s performance to ensure the company is getting what it is paying for.

What if a company, with an employee’s active engagement, is able to determine, based largely on a single metric, that a certain hire will likely be more successful than another person?

The Quotient Personal Value Calculation (QTNT PVC1) system can do this.

Employees, on the other hand, are rightfully seeking the highest-possible pay rate for their skills. What if an employee knows going in that she will be paid at the top of the pay scale? This is about more than equal pay for equal work. This is about proper pay for outstanding performance.

The Quotient can do this.

The QTNT process is about workers taking responsibility for their own pay and well-being; it is about a new kind of performance review. It is also about workers educating themselves on how, as well as how much, they contribute to their companies.

The Quotient is about employers embracing a new kind of compensation model based on their employees presenting their value to the organization in a defensible and reasonable manner. It is about employees performing as if they have some skin in the game—because they quickly learn they do.

The QTNT calculation is a metric so remarkably simple that, as you learn more, you will wonder why this measurement has never been used in business before now.

Performance Appraisal

The Quotient, as designed, outperforms subjective performance-appraisal management systems, if for no other reason than current systems are subjective. The QTNT PVC process, in concert with the appraisal system I will introduce later in the book, helps employees set realistic, attainable goals and allows them, with management input and guidance, to manage the process on their own. How much time and money would that save enterprise? Millions? Billions? The objective QTNT calculation process can achieve this and more.

The Quotient has the power and the clout to positively impact all workers at all stages of their employment life cycle. And there’s a bonus (sound the horns!): it’s engaging and motivates employees to think like owners!

* * *

You may think that personal accomplishment is relatively easy to measure. Well, it is—if you are in sales—and it isn’t if you are everybody else. Most employees don’t have a clue how to measure the value of what they do.

To some, performance can mean as little as doing just enough to keep their job, or it can mean strategically outmaneuvering and outperforming the competition—their coworkers—enough to impress the powers that be and convince them that they are the person most worthy of promotion.

Keep all of this in mind as I share the Quotient with you. This powerful equation is simple and straightforward, but it is a management tool that will revolutionize how you prove your worth to your employer, how your employer will compare achievements among “equals,” and how your division or branch will prove its value to the organization.

The Formula

Before we go any further, let me share the Quotient formula with you:

CONTRIBUTION (C) ÷ Base PAY (P) = The QTNT Score

Where CONTRIBUTION equals the value of a worker’s performance on the job divided by that person’s rate of base PAY.

Never before has anyone divided a non-sales professional’s personal value contribution to the company by his or her rate of pay. Why has this idea not been part of the business lingo before now? Probably because no one has ever thought to teach non-sales workers how to determine the value of their work before.

As a result of using this equation, employees can literally begin to take charge of their careers in a way that salespeople always have. The Quotient enables workers to determine their real worth to the company and to themselves.

Let’s say, for example, that no one noticed when Ron came up with a little “tweak” in the IT security platform that saved the company $100,000 in reduced service calls. (These kinds of “little” savings occur in business all the time.) But Ron did. By calculating his Quotient for this event, he can capture the value of his contribution and, to his benefit, share it with his managers.

From the employee’s point of view (and everyone, even the CEO, is an employee), what’s important is that the employee learns how to identify those costs associated with what h...

Table of contents

• Title
• What They are Saying about Leveling the Paying Field
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The Quotient: A Very Simple Idea
• 2 The QTNT Personal Value Calculation
• Q-STUDY NO. 1
• 3 Three Kinds of QTNT Scores
• 4 Three Ways of Looking at a Q < 1
• Q-STUDY NO. 2
• 5 Salespeople Don’t Need the QTNT Process—Yet
• 6 Your Work Does Not Speak for Itself
• 7 It’s OK for Your Boss to Take Credit for Your Work (Ouch!)
• Q-STUDY NO. 3
• 8 Your Commercial Value
• 9 Your Employer Is Not Responsible for Pointing Out Your Wins
• Q-STUDY NO. 4
• 10 Your Accomplishments Inventory
• 11 The Defensible Statement and the Perfect Elevator Pitch
• Q-STUDY NO. 5
• 12 The Quotient and Soft Skills
• 13 Quantification of Achievement
• Q-STUDY NO. 6
• 14 The Net Result
• 15 Formatting Accomplishments for Presentation
• Q-STUDY No. 7
• 16 Speaking About You
• 17 Accomplishments as a Tool: Where to Share
• 18 Your Accomplishments and Your QTNT Score
• Q-STUDY NO. 8
• 19 Equal Pay or the Proper Pay?
• 20 Parents, Teach Your Daughters to Negotiate
• Q-STUDY NO. 9
• 21 The Quotient and the Future of Employment
• 22 The (Employment) Circle of Life
• 23 The Earning Curve™
• Q-STUDY NO. 10
• 24 Personal Performance Appraisal: Identifying Your Value
• 25 Speaking Up at Your Appraisal
• Q-STUDY NO. 11
• 26 There Is No I in Team
• 27 Personal Performance Review: The Work Diary
• Q-STUDY NO. 12
• 28 Calculating Your Annual Quotient (Including Q = 1)
• 29 Personal Performance Appraisal Prep
• 30 Personal Performance Appraisal: A Revolution
• Q-STUDY NO. 13
• 31 Project Management and the Quotient
• 32 Independent Contractors, PMs, and the Quotient
• Q-STUDY NO. 14
• 33 Open-Book Management
• 34 The Overhead Expense Discussion
• 35 Engagement: Thinking Like an Owner
• 36 The Quotient and Proper Pay
• 37 Position-Based Weighting and the Quotient
• 38 Quotient Weighting in Practice
• 39 The Baseline Audit
• 40 Why Industry Detests Performance Appraisals
• 41 Big 5 Performance Management
• 42 The Big 5–Q Performance Model
• 43 The Quotient as a Hiring Tool
• 44 A Very Brief Legal Look at the Quotient
• 45 Summing
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright