Consulting
If you’re like many small- to mid-size organizations, you probably need additional HR support.
If your organization is interested in having your people and culture and human resources practices reflect and embody the values you are fighting for externally, we'd love to work with you. If you’d find it useful to be able to turn to a trained professional for expertise and strategic guidance, Vega Mala Consulting can provide you with custom HR and operations consultation.
We provide strategic guidance and training support customized to organizational lifecycle challenges: from strengthening value-based, mission-driven people practices; to nourishing a productive and efficient workplace that fosters a leaderful and team-oriented culture.
Vega Mala Consulting focuses on the following service areas:
Mission-Driven HR Strategy & Planning
Equitable Compensation
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Mission-Driven HR Strategy & Planning
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Equitable Compensation
Mission-Driven HR Strategy and Planning
Your people-policies and practices are directly tied to your organization’s success and progress. We’ll review your mission, strategic and operational plans, and your HR policies and practices, and work with you to design policies that reflect your organizational values and context, and support your managers with training in principled, people-centered, and productive management tools and techniques. We’ll help you align your structure, strategies, and culture with your overall mission and programmatic efforts so they’re working in sync.
Vega Mala Consulting’s offerings in this area include:
Employer Philosophy
Your organization likely espouses a set of values that guide how you approach your mission. The employer philosophy provides a place for you to articulate how you plan to show up as an employer based on these values, and what your expectations are of your employees. It helps get everybody on the same page regarding expectations, and can especially reduce conflicts across generations, cultures, and political ideologies. It also offers you a place to articulate the legal constraints that impede your abilities to live out your aspirational values.
We help organizational leaders draft your employer philosophy, meet with your board and staff to gather feedback, and finalize the document so that it can become part of your onboarding process for new staff.
Leadership, Management, and Supervision Manual
A leadership and supervision manual sets a basic standard that all leaders in your organization will be expected to align with. It provides leaders a reference for decision-making, problem-solving, and communication. In addition, leadership, management, and supervision require different competencies, and organizations that meld them together lose out on aligning their staff with what they do best. This manual allows your organization to differentiate the competencies required for leadership, management, and supervision, which in turn allows you to ensure that staffing for each role. It clarifies roles and responsibilities, allowing you to design positions that help staff succeed. Finally, it includes a compendium of resources for your organization to draw from in each of these areas.
We write a leadership, management, and supervision manual for your organization by:
Interviewing key leaders
Reviewing your current documents to understand the competencies needed in your organization in positions of leadership, management, and supervision
Surfacing policies, processes, and practices for your organization to standardize
People Policies & Processes
We support organizations to strengthen your policies and processes related to professional development, performance alignment, and promotion pathways – through a people-centered, values-aligned, and movement-oriented lens.
Staff Office Support Hours
Staff are very interested in getting professional development opportunities, but don’t always have access to such opportunities because of budget constraints. As an alternative, we offer staff office support hours. In these sessions, we guide, coach, and advise staff on how they can navigate challenges, conflicts, and opportunities around their role, their team, and the organization.
Professional Development Strategy & Individual Support
As people change roles within an organization, there is a need to shift perspectives. The skills and talents a person brings to their current position are often different from those they need to develop in their new position. For example, it can be hard for someone who is used to doing the work to shift to supervising the work and strategizing how the work should be done.
We support staff in understanding the shifts required of them, and developing a professional development plan in order to make those shifts.
Roles and Responsibilities Documentation
Roles and responsibilities can get sticky and nebulous as organizations grow or contract. We help organizations clarify the boundaries and overlaps of positions to help staff understand when they are autonomously responsible for a task, activity, or project, and when they need to partner with others.
Performance Alignment
Many of the standard practices for performance evaluation are rooted in capitalist, supremacist, imperialist (you get the idea) ideologies and metrics. For organizations committed to liberatory values, we help you to bring your performance process into alignment with your values. This process also helps supervisors set clear expectations, surface performance gaps, and support employees with appropriate professional development or a values-aligned transition process either into another position within your organization or out of your organization.
Equitable Compensation
Compensation is the biggest line item for most organizations, and compensation has the greatest impact on employees. Traditional, market-based compensation-setting practices widen the racial wealth gap, even when they don’t intend to. And even those of us who are committed to eliminating the racial wealth gap have deep-seated beliefs and trauma around money and pay that impede us from shifting away from traditional, market-based compensation-setting practices.
This is why we prioritize equitable compensation in our work. We use an approach that strives to increase transparency, fairness, and mission and values alignment–while maintaining compliance.
Vega Mala Consulting’s offerings in this area include:
Equitable Compensation Organizational Assessment
Our organizational assessment offers a place for you to start your journey toward equitable compensation practices by providing clarity around how staff feel about your current practices. We survey all staff regarding the following areas:
Organizational culture
Management, growth and advancement, and performance
Compensation and benefits
Compensation system
Compensation beliefs and perspectives
We also collect demographic information on all staff to detect any patterns of pain points in your current system. We use the survey results to offer you an informed, data-driven set of recommendations about where to start your equitable compensation journey.
Please note: In these projects, we do not develop a new compensation structure for you. Rather, the assessment is an entry point for you to initiate your exploration into re-envisioning your compensation structure.
Compensation Systems Analysis
Our compensation systems analysis offers you a diagnostic audit report of your current compensation policies and practices.
We conduct an inventory and analysis of your total compensation system through an equity lens. Specifically, we analyze the following areas:
Pay History
Your Historical Employee Satisfaction surveys
Pay Equity Audit and Pay Gap Analysis
Compensation & Benefits Policies
Benchmarking
Peer Organizations
Market Research
Living & Thriving Wage Comparisons
Please note: our compensation systems analysis concludes with a final report, but does not include implementation.
Compensation Philosophy
Your compensation philosophy describes how your total compensation package aligns with your organization’s mission, vision, and values. It articulates the assumptions, beliefs, and constraints behind your organization’s total compensation package. A compensation philosophy can support all employees to understand what practices you will or won't adopt, and why.
We help organizations develop your compensation philosophy, in partnership with organizational leaders. As part of this process, we:
Interview key stakeholders to understand your desired compensation policy and strategy
Review your current total compensation package and compensation practices to understand and capture the underlying assumptions and beliefs
Draft a compensation philosophy with multiple iterations based on feedback from key organizational stakeholders and leaders
Compensation Policies
Compensation systems require employee policies, standardized processes, and administrative procedures to support them working smoothly. This would include policies like COLA, high-to-low salary ratios, severance, signing bonuses, bonus policies, and internal promotional paths.
When you change the compensation system, we disentangle compensation from performance, but there still needs to be a performance process, and it needs to be clearly articulated.
Please note: In the above projects, we do not develop a new compensation structure for you.
Equitable Compensation Structure
A compensation structure project helps to ensure that your compensation structure is grounded in your organizational culture and values, and moves toward greater equity. We support you in:
Current Salary Model “Plus”: VMC restructures your current salary bands, or works with you to document salary bands if none exist, with an eye toward equity.
Full Compensation Equity Framework Project: VMC designs an entirely new compensation structure for your organization based on our Compensation Equity Framework and Process™. At the end of this process, you will have a compensation structure that embodies your organizational values in your compensation structure.
Organizational Assessment & Compensation System Analysis [see above]
Equitable Compensation Structure: We co-design, develop, and implement a salary structure in a highly participatory way.
Full Compensation Equity Framework Project:
A comprehensive equitable compensation project includes conducting an organizational assessment, completing a compensation systems analysis, developing an equitable compensation structure, and writing a compensation philosophy. We use an organizational change approach, and we separate the assessment phase from the implementation phase. We team with organizational development experts to support facilitated conversations with all staff, and the project requires full employee and stakeholder engagement.
For this full equitable compensation project, we start with a scope-to-scope discovery process that involves you, your management team, your staff, and your board to learn more about what you want to accomplish, assess where you are, and put together a customized plan to support you based on where your organization is and where you want to be. The plan may include some or all of these components:
Employee engagement with a diverse compensation working group
Phase 1: Assessment
Organizational Assessment, including total compensation inventory (assessment / data analysis)
Compensation Systems Analysis
Recommendations and Implementation plan
Phase 2: Learning and design decisions
Depending on Phase 1 results, we'll support the organization with some political analysis and education on how and why compensation practices can be inequitable.
The organization would have some design decisions to make based on what the organization has the capacity to implement
Implementation
Equitable compensation structure
Market-informed research
Compensation Philosophy
Compensation-related Policies
A successful equitable compensation structure project requires organizations to meet the Conditions for Readiness. If you are interested in this project and don’t yet meet the conditions, we can provide guidance in moving your organization toward readiness.
For more information about our approach, see the following resources:
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Our Rates
Our Rates
Vega Mala Consulting charges between $300-500 per hour, depending on the project and your organization’s annual budget. We typically structure our Mission-Driven HR Strategy & Planning work on a monthly hour retainer-basis, and our Equitable Compensation work on a project-basis.
For more information about Vega Mala Consulting’s rates, please fill out this intake form and we can provide an estimate.
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Our Commitments
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Our Approach
Our Commitments
Collaborative consulting. You have expertise. We have expertise. It’s our combined expertise and efforts that are going to help guide the right path.
Capacity building. We’re committed to building your internal capacity to the extent that you wish. We build capacity through the collaborative process and by transferring the knowledge, skills, and abilities we have to a staff person on your team.
Commitment to Social Justice. In order to serve your organization and your mission most effectively, we believe that those most affected by the work we do must have a voice in creating the solution. Therefore, we must have access to people at all levels of your organization, and they must have access to us.
Continuous Learning. The success of our work together depends on the effectiveness of our relationship. We need to be able to give each other bi-directional and contemporaneous feedback.
Confidentiality: We maintain confidentiality at all levels of our work and see this as critical for building mutual trust with both organizational leaders and staff.
Our Approach
People-centered: We hold staff dignity and professional development as key to the sustainability of the organization, the movement, and the longer-term, cross-sector, community-based work that is critical to building a just and equitable society.
Values-aligned: We approach human resources management from a social justice perspective and promote equitable solutions that lift the organization’s and staff’s ability to meet the mission in the most effective way.
Movement-oriented: We intentionally situate HR in the space of our movements and ecosystems to support people through-out an organization to be the ambassadors and future leaders of your organization, our movements, and change agents to shift our societal conditions.
Evidence-based: We work to combine the best available research with our HR experience and with your desired goals, preferences, and lived experience so that solutions are context-specific, cumulative, and future-oriented.
Ready to get started? Let us know how we can help!