4y
Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a review and I’m sorry to hear about your experience. I, as CEO, and we, as a company, are always looking for ways to improve the work environment for all our employees, so I appreciate your feedback.
From what I understand in your review, I believe your concerns were related to a handful of main areas and I want to take this opportunity to address them individually:
(1) Benefits
From what I read one specific area of frustration was in regards to our benefits package. At this time, we’re proud to offer:
- 16 weeks of parental leave for ALL parents (8 weeks paid, 8 weeks unpaid)
- 100% employer covered health insurance for all full- and part-time employees and dependents
- 15 days of paid vacation, which now rollover up to 6 weeks total
- 12 additional company holidays each year
- Sick and personal time, medical leave, and bereavement leave, as needed
- Dental and vision insurance for you, your partner, and your dependents (available for U.S. residents/citizens), not subsidized by the company at this time
- Flexible spending account (FSA) for medical expenses and childcare (available for U.S. residents/citizens)
- 401(k) plan with 4% match and no vesting time (available for U.S. residents/citizens)
- $1000 yearly professional development stipend
- $200 monthly coworking or childcare stipend
- Tech equipment stipend
To address two specific concerns about our benefits that you mentioned in the review:
Tech equipment - I appreciate your feedback here and can see why this was a point of frustration.
As a distributed company of 20 without a dedicated equipment / IT team, we’ve been reluctant to manage equipment for our employees, but we’re now researching ways to outsource this for future employees.
Focusing on benefits for families - Another concern was about the fact that our benefits are focused on families. This focus on families has been one of the core values of our company since its inception in 2012, and our first staff member took paid parental leave in 2015.
As a company that strives to create a positive work environment for women, we have chosen to prioritize benefits that specifically address common challenges women face in the workforce. This includes parental leave, sick and medical leave, childcare, flexible working hours, and remote work.
We are a small, independent company that has not raised venture capital, and has to run profitably to stay in business. That means we are often in the position of making difficult tradeoffs about how to allocate the resources we have to maximize benefit to our employees while staying true to our mission and values.
(2) Compensation
Building on that, I want to address the concerns raised about compensation. As an independent startup that has to run sustainably, it is difficult for us to compete with the salaries offered by venture-backed, or larger companies.
In light of our limited resources, we’ve chosen to focus on pay equity. What this has meant in practice is that the floor is high for salaries at Skillcrush (no one makes less than $55,000) and the salary ceiling is relatively low.
In all, most of our salaries fall close to the median range for a company of our size in the education sector, with the exception of upper management and executives who make below the 50th percentile. Ultimately, our goal is to provide a living wage to all our employees, especially those who are traditionally on the lower end of the pay scale. For those who can command higher salaries in the market, they have to choose to come to Skillcrush for another reason (our mission, we hope!).
That all said, I fully understand the desire to make more money and I respect anyone who chooses to leave in pursuit of a higher salary elsewhere.
(3) Management Style
With respect to your concerns about my management style of the Sales team, I’m sorry that you felt that way. It is true that I am a hands-on CEO who enjoys being operationally involved in the business on a daily basis.
For the past several years, I have also served in the capacity of acting Director of Sales, and in that capacity, directly managed individual contributors on the sales team.
As I’ve mentioned, one of my largest challenges as a CEO is dealing with resources and resource allocation. And I fully acknowledge that being both the person that is driving revenue and the person who oversees the budget has real challenges. In the future my goal is to separate the two functions.
(4) Anti-Racism / DEI Efforts
I totally accept and agree with your point that my African American Studies degree does not make me an expert in DEI issues.
I take DEI efforts very seriously as I hope is evident in our anti-racism pledge, but operating as an anti-racist company is an ongoing and never-ending journey. At this time, we continue to work on every aspect of what is outlined in our anti-racism pledge, including a scholarship program.
With that I will just end by saying again that I do truly appreciate this feedback and the opportunity to address it, and I also appreciate all the work you did for us while you were at Skillcrush.
Thank you,
Adda Birnir
