What Egypt can teach you about beating inflation
Look to Egypt in 2017 for ways to address inflation at scale
Last month I polled comp leaders on what they are doing to combat growing global inflation (even compared to wage increases).
For inspiration on what to do, consider looking to past examples of managing spiking inflation rates.
The example of Egypt in 2017
When I was at Juniper Networks in 2017, our employees in Egypt experienced extreme inflation rates.
Following a coup d’etat in 2013, the country was thrown into political and economic crisis in the following years, with inflation spiking to over 30% in 2017.
We had a small, high-performing sales team in Egypt, and they were seeking relief.
Employee salaries were halving their purchasing power in a quarter.
There were stranger effects too; sales targets would become artificially low at the same time. Quarterly performance would dramatically exceed target while revenue would come in under USD targets.
It become clear that doing nothing wasn’t an option.
Leadership in Egypt wanted us to increase wages each month to keep up with inflation, and to pay in USD (at the time, this was impossible).
We didn’t want to get sucked into the economic volatility, and we worried that taking action could exacerbate the country’s inflation problems.
With the cooperation of our Egyptian company leadership, we ended up putting a program in place to review salaries quarterly instead of annually. Instead of looking at lagging salary data alone, we considered inflationary data alongside salary surveys. As a result, employees felt fairly treated, and the noise died down.
What are the takeaways?
Communication and trust were cornerstones of our inflation strategy.
We collaborated with local leaders
We set a clear policy everyone understood
We brought predictability back to the employee experience
And the program was scalable in the sense that we effectively localized market adjustment review by frequency and data source, something we could replicate in other high-inflation countries like Argentina.
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