Ratio Based Remuneration and Compensation System

Development Associates Link International (DALI) was founded 20 years ago and growing exponentially from $3 USD to now 109 countries across all continents employing 1659 associates and professionals, headquartered in Kampala, Uganda. DALI is a trading entity focused on, regenerative and transformative consulting, project design and management, investment and financing. Our vision is to create a legacy of socioeconomic transformation and development while maintaining an inclusive human capitalism approach to development across nations. 

Given the foundation of DALI, it has taken quite a change from a typically Human Capital and Institutional Development (HCID) consulting entity blended with financial inclusion, business development services, training and capacity building, research and development, and mental and psychosocial support services engaging from the bottom of the pyramid to top conglomerates today. 

Change and pivoting for DALI did not come without goal-directed and initiative-taking collective agreement to consider Gender Equality Changemakers (GEC) programme. Since the inception, we considered our investments and projects to target humanity primarily and others (botany and zoology for example) secondarily, over the last 10 years DALI has been more involved in investment projects across 16 sectors, and more recently global commodity trading which triggered realigning our remuneration and compensation system. 

Prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, DALI had already embraced technology and single dashboard collaborative working, thus almost 2/3 of the team worked hybrid with most of the team working off-site, though we maintained our monthly team building get-together across regions and countries. With over 63% of our team members being female and 37% male, the pivoting mostly affected the women since our work schedules became 24 hours shifts to align with different time zones and experts were scattered across countries even while collaboratively undertaking projects and trading across multiple stock exchange markets. Though, as much as the women worked mostly during the day, when not much activity was taking place, the men were also overwhelmed since they would work the night shifts. We knew women were more involved in the home and family affairs management, not to say men didn’t, but our internal assessment showed that women tend to be busier, especially if they are married or parenting, while those who still lived with parents either had curfews or were also conditioned to home chores (especially the women). 

The Company Global Board, Regional Boards and Country Boards plus Management endorsed the proposal to institute a ratio-based remuneration and compensation system that calculated level of effort, workload, workflow interlinks, peak and low work hours, and other variables. Which would be surprising that DALI has never believed in eight-hour work schedules (i.e. from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM) and it has been more about the level of effort; because the workload over three hours could be more intense than six hours, yet the six-hour workday depended on deliverables from the three hours. The intensity of our work schedules happens either in the night or early hours of the morning across continents.  

We decided to establish a Gender Equality Change Corporate Strategy budget to keep improving the current system through the ERP and CRM collaborative dashboard customised to DALIs workflow. This creative and innovative system can be emulated by several organisations across the globe after we are confident and 100% sure on the outcomes of the use case. Since then, we are refining our action plan towards our Gender Equality Change and have also assigned a team of persons in the organisations to lead the process after graduating in May 2024 with a certificate in the GEC programme.  

We are optimistic this will be realised and go a long way since the Global Group Lead and Executive Chairman undertook the course offered by the Digital Frontiers Institute (DFI), and qualified as a Gender Equality Changemakers. Our heartfelt gratitude and credit goes out to our staff who undertook the course and committed as GEC participants and DFI for offering the team scholarships to undertake the course. The richness of the content was world class, and the facilitators were collaborative, and presented deep subject matter expertise, while allowing participation of all learners through different activities.  

 

By Dr. Henry Clarke Kisembo, PhD 

Global Lead and Executive Chairman at Development Associates Link International (DALI) 

DFI Community Member 

Established in 2015, Digital Frontiers Institute is a proud brand of Digital Frontiers. Learn more about the Gender Equality Changemakers programme and find out how to enrol: https://genderequality.digitalfrontiersinstitute.org/