LevellingFrameworks

At the point I joined Dune, we were 20 people. Less than a year later and we are now ~60 people, across 20+ countries. Some meaningful growth, that stirred up some meaningful challenges!

Something we wanted (needed) pretty quickly, was data. We launched Dune’s engagement survey to understand how people were feeling. Delving into the comments, some clear themes became apparent. The team were asking:

• What is expected of me day to day?
• What progression is there for me at Dune?
• Why am I paid what I’m paid?
• Give clarity and set expectations for us all: A career framework defines the required competencies and behaviours for each level. This helps provide clarity on what is expected of us all in our current roles.
• Provide the foundations for meaningful career progression: Enabling career progression is key to engage and retain our team. A framework by level can demonstrate career paths by defining what is required at the next level as well as showing what strong performance looks like in the current role.
• Enable fair evaluation of performance and promotion: Defined levels mean we can assess people fairly and promote people based on the same criteria. It’s critical for removing subjectivity and bias — key for D&I and to our value of integrity.
• Allow more transparency around pay and helps answer “why am I paid this”? Role + level + Dune’s compensation philosophy = your pay.
• Speed, yes you shouldn’t rush it:Speed, yes you shouldn’t rush it:Speed, yes you shouldn’t rush it: We rushed a little as we had promised the team a pay review (and felt it was important to follow through with what we promised). The consequence was excess pressure on the leaders (the content writers) and not enough time given to the team to review the framework before they were levelled. This was a mistake.
• Start with a company wide view. Start with a company wide view. Start with a company wide view. We dived right into functional career frameworks; which means we have good definitions and expectations set by function, but we have no overarching framework sharing a common set of competencies companywide. E.g. We don’t have a shared view on how people are expected to communicate across the business for example. Important in a fully remote org.
• Language matters. Language matters. Language matters. We got the most feedback in this area. It is hard defining ‘entry’ or ‘junior’ roles without inadvertently describing them as less important than the other levels (which of course isn’t correct). We changed the language we used but I’m sure we still haven’t got it right.

The controversial bit. We approached this by asking both the manager and function leader (i.e. our CTO for engineering & product) to separately level each individual, based on the framework. When there was a disagreement, we got together to align.

To calibrate against teams we shared the initial company-wide levelling with each manager and gave them the chance to challenge each other. There were a handful of cases where we made adjustments based on these challenges — an essential step for equity across teams.

Frameworks create clarity, and force meaningful discussion around expectations. They can unearth potential unspoken misalignment between manager and individual. If the framework is written effectively then it should force these difficult conversations. I would say this was probably the hardest part of the process - we are talking about people’s careers after all!

Sharing the framework in advance, asking for feedback and explaining it was the first version seemed to help.

We combined the levelling conversations with pay discussions, with the aim that each person would have both clarity on their level, the associated expectation and what that means in terms of their compensation by the end of the process.

📎 Dune’s Career Frameworks (imperfect and still being iterated on but I hope helpful for some of you) : 👉Engineering 👉Product 👉Community 👉People

We haven’t finished and have a way to go. We have the V1 frameworks on Notion, the team are levelled and now have pay reflective of that level. However, we are far from done. We need to embed the frameworks into our performance and recruitment processes, we need to create more alignment across functions and we need leadership frameworks - some good projects for 2023!

💭 Thoughts and feedback really very welcome. Please share here