Maslow on Derecho en Zapatillas: employee compensation, new forms and trends

Article published in Derecho en Zapatillas on December 16, 2022, by Sergio.

Employee Compensation: New Forms and Trends

While paying salaries in cash is common, companies sometimes provide employees with in-kind payments or non-traditional compensation such as benefits or incentives. What are the limits and requirements for these arrangements?

"Instead of companies deciding, we allow the employee to choose which benefits they want to receive," explains Matías Botbol, tech entrepreneur and currently co-founder of Maslow, along with Diego Boryszanski.

Maslow is a company that helps "companies offer compensation, incentives, and benefits tailored to each employee's needs, enabling them to get the best return on their work, with the mission of building lasting employment relationships." We spoke with him from Derecho En Zapatillas.

How did you come up with the idea for Maslow?

Coming from other tech companies, we saw they had different needs and we tried to offer each person what they needed in a manual way. Then we realized it could be done through technology with a company that could keep employees happy, with flexible benefits and compensation, more easily and scalably.

For companies, we solve benefits management and incentivize their staff to stay working with them because they receive what they need.

How does technology help with this? Is it a platform?

It's a platform that companies manage—they onboard their staff and teams, give them access and define rules, and then each person defines their own rewards and compensation. It's named after Maslow's pyramid, to help understand people's needs.

What kind of benefits? Would this be extra on top of salary?

The company allocates the budget for the benefit—sometimes gym, food, things like that—but it ends up that not everyone needs the same thing and companies invest money in many things that the person doesn't use. So they give it directly within our platform and then each person chooses. The categories are varied, from language classes, health, wellness, any need people have.

What are the challenges today in compensation?

Sometimes legislation doesn't keep up and that forces companies to be rigid. That in turn doesn't help with the dynamism that people now need. Generally speaking, the basic compensation structure hasn't changed much since the Industrial Revolution and laws are oriented toward that, but new generations are already looking for more flexibility in their work.

This accelerated with the pandemic, such as the benefit of remote work. Sometimes, when the company isn't flexible, employees end up changing jobs and this has brought a lot of turnover, precisely because of that lack of flexibility.

Can you share a use case?

One company that hired Maslow used the benefit to go out to eat together—the people themselves chose that redemption and in turn this fostered interaction among the people who work there, what's known as team building. This was an unexpected positive consequence of using the platform.

So it also works as a loyalty system, with the ability to access benefits that the employee themselves chooses. And this benefits both the company and the employee, because it makes everything more efficient.

At Maslow we charge a fixed fee (monthly fee) per employee and we even negotiate with companies so that the benefit costs them less if they contract it directly, a kind of collective purchasing.

Legal Issues Around Salary and Compensation

Compensation must be defined according to the applicable jurisdiction. Under Argentine law, salary may be set by time or by work performance, and in the latter case by unit of work, individual or collective commission, profit-sharing, bonuses or profit participation, and may be supplemented with prizes in any of their forms or modalities.

Article 105 of the employment contract law states that salary must be paid in money, in kind, housing, food, or through the opportunity to obtain benefits or profits.

Supplementary benefits, whether in money or in kind, are part of the employee's compensation. Compensation set by collective bargaining agreements must be expressed, in its entirety, in money. The employer may not allocate in-kind payments to more than 20% of total compensation.

Read the full article at Derecho en Zapatillas