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Workweek Newsletter {beacon}

Hebba Youssef

Sep 18th, 2026

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Hi ya party people,

Happy Friday to all my emotionally exhausted friends!

Hoping you get some time over the weekend to temporarily turn your brain off and rest a lil. ✨

But before you think about hibernation, here’s what we have on the agenda today:

First, an academic employee wants to know how pay can be considered equitable when a master’s degree earns you the same salary as someone without one.

Then, an HR leader is rolling out workplace culture standards and already knows some supervisors may treat them like the terms and conditions on an iPhone update: scroll, agree, immediately forget. 🥴

Sooo, how do you decide what equitable pay means? And how do you make culture standards matter when certain managers believe accountability is for other people?

Pour something caffeinated and let’s open up the floor for some discussion!

P.S. Wanna submit a question? Send it in here, and you might be featured next Friday! 👀

ASK AWAY

💡equity & culture

✍🏾 I'm wondering what best practice is for determining what's equitable pay

Context: My HR office isn't factoring in Masters degrees for 'equity' purposes and they offer the same salary for the same role regardless if they have an extra year or masters degree versus someone else on the team at the same rate. This doesn't feel right to me. I'm in Academia- maybe that's why?

📣 Erik Bates, Comp Consultant/Total Unicorn@ CompCatalyst, LLC:

I can completely understand why you say it doesn't "feel right" considering the time and effort it takes to earn that graduate degree. It's not all that uncommon, however, for graduate degrees to not have as much of an impact on pay as one would expect. I mean, it's one of the selling points in getting the degree, right!?

You're speaking of equity when it comes to offers. My thought is that this is a reflection of how the institution values a graduate degree. However, it could also simply be functions of the pay structure and compensation philosophy of the institution. If the institution utilizes a grade and step pay structure, it is not uncommon to start everyone on the same step, regardless of qualifications. This is common particularly in government jobs.

Outside of the step structure, it is incredibly common for offers to be made based solely on the minimum requirements for the job. If a Bachelor's degree is the minimum, then a Master's degree is nice, but doesn't carry any weight insofar as pay is concerned. It might be a factor in determining who gets an offer, but not in how much they're paid.

My first "big boy" job after grad school was in Higher Education, in which a Master's degree was a requirement for me to manage a residence hall and live in the same facility as 900 first-year students all for the ultra-competitive wage of $28,000/yr.

📣 Donna Griffin, Director of People & Culture @ Intelligentsia Coffee:

The job description should determine the required education for a role. For example, if I require a Bachelor's and someone has a Ph.D., I wouldn't pay them for anything beyond what is needed. They are still qualified, but their extra qualifications are not relevant for the role. If someone pursued a Master's Degree for their own development, my company would not compensate that employee more simply for the attainment.

That said, a salary band normally allows for the possibility to pay a candidate more if they have more experience than others in the role, which is where this might show up. But, again, the experience has to be relevant to the job they are doing, not extra enhancements outside the role. You are all doing the same job, so a simple example might be a new hire who starts at the 25%th percentile of the band, whereas someone who is proficient might be at 50% of the band and someone with years of experience might be at the 75thth percentile. All are doing the job, but they are performing with different levels of capability, skill and independence.

📣 Tammi Burnett, Director of People and Culture @ Rainforest Action Network:

It really depends on the pay philosophy. Some orgs do pay the same for the same role, that's a philosophy based on equality and it does avoid potential bias based on identity (race, education/class, gender, etc.). Does your organization have a communicated compensation philosophy?

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✍🏾 How do you implement workplace culture standards/guidance and keep supervisors accountable to this code?

Context: We are a large department with smaller units within it. We have created workplace culture standards and want to implement it in a few weeks. I am concerned that some supervisors will not abide by these culture standards and am not sure how to keep them accountable to it...or if I should.

📣 Rosetta Williams, Sr. Director, People Talent & Culture @ Immigrant Justice Corps:

Your instinct is right, and I'd go further: what you're describing isn't a worry, it's a prediction. Culture standards that launch without supervisors being told "this is now part of your job and you'll be evaluated on it" get read as an HR values poster. The supervisors who were already the problem will treat them as decoration — and honestly, they'll be right to, because nothing in their actual world changed.

So yes, you should hold supervisors accountable to it. But you personally shouldn't be the enforcement mechanism, and that distinction is the whole game.

A few things I'd push for before your launch date:

Roll it out to supervisors first, separately. If line staff hear the standards at the same time as supervisors, staff immediately start measuring supervisors against expectations supervisors haven't been oriented to. You'll get complaints you can't resolve in month one, and the standards lose credibility fast. Give supervisors the standards first, framed as a job expectation — not a culture conversation.

Translate the standards into observable behaviors. "Respectful communication" is unenforceable. "Holds regular 1:1s." "Delivers corrective feedback directly rather than through a third party." "Doesn't discuss one team member's performance with their peers." "Responds to leave requests within X days." Those are observable, coachable, and documentable. With smaller units inside a larger department, this may need to happen unit by unit if they genuinely operate differently. Without this translation work, you have nothing to actually hold anyone to.

On accountability, three things work and the rest is theater:

1. It has to be weighted in the performance evaluation. If a supervisor can earn a fully successful rating while failing the culture standards, the standards are optional. This is your highest-leverage lever, and it needs your department head's signature — not yours.

2. It has to run up the line, not through HR. Unit managers hold supervisors; the department head holds unit managers. The moment HR becomes the enforcement arm, every conversation gets processed as an HR complaint instead of a management expectation, and supervisors start managing their exposure to you rather than changing their behavior.

3. You need data that isn't self-report. Upward feedback or climate results broken out by unit is what makes a supervisor's performance visible to their own boss. You also already have data sitting there: turnover, transfer requests, grievances, leave patterns, exit themes. Cut all of it by unit. Nothing moves a department head faster than one unit's numbers sitting next to the others.

Your role is to build the capability, not absorb the accountability. Design the standards, write the behaviors, train, equip each supervisor's boss to have the conversation, hold the data, escalate the patterns. That's a full plate and it's legitimately yours. "Enforcing culture" isn't.

The part nobody wants to plan for: the credibility of these standards will be set entirely by what happens at the first visible violation by a supervisor people assume is protected. If nothing happens, staff learn the real rule and stop reporting — and you don't get a second launch. So get leadership to confirm the consequence path now, before rollout. If they won't, that's important information rather than a dead end: scope this as an aspirational statement rather than a standard, and don't promise staff a mechanism that doesn't exist. Not ideal, but survivable. Promising accountability you can't deliver isn't.

Last thing — on your timeline. A few weeks is enough to launch this to supervisors. It's not enough to launch department-wide with accountability attached, since the evaluation piece has to follow your appraisal cycle anyway. Phasing it that way is a feature, not a delay. Show less

📣 Stephanie Slysz, Head of People & Recruitment @ Tarbell Center for AI Journalism:

I’d think about the rollout and integration as much as the standards themselves. The best culture expectations are reinforced through the systems and norms you already have, rather than creating another freestanding document that people read once and forget about.

For example, could you add a question to your existing 1:1 template about how someone is demonstrating the culture standards? Could following the standards be included in job descriptions and then become part of the annual review conversation? You could also build a training around what success looks like in your department and use real behavioral examples of supervisors and employees who are modeling the standards well.

Recognition can be a big part of this, too. Encourage managers to give shout-outs when they see someone demonstrating the standards. That helps make the expectations visible and reinforces that this is actually part of what the organization values.

As for accountability, I’d be clear with supervisors that these standards are part of their job and being a manager here. Then give them the tools and examples to meet the expectations. If someone consistently isn't adhering to them, that should become a management/performance conversation just like any other expectation of the role.

There’s a lot more to think about in the rollout and, especially, the integration. Otherwise, you risk creating more bureaucracy without actually changing the culture. Good luck!

📣 Stephanie Lemek, Founder & CEO @ The Wounded Workforce:

I don't think you should enforce them personally. I think it puts you in too difficult of a position to actually succeed and potentially hurt working relationships with your peers. You don't need to be the 'culture police'- that sounds like it sucks. What I would recommend is some kind of KPI you can report on that makes your leaders accountable for the culture on their teams and then let leaders hold each other accountable like the would for other KPIs

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