<aside> 📌 If you are considering a promotion for an employee who is a Foreign National working pursuant to a visa, you must check with the Compliance Specialist and/or your HRBP to see if there are any considerations that must first be taken from an immigration perspective.

</aside>

Things to consider before promoting someone

To promote a team member, 3 conditions need to be met (4 for Managers)

<aside> 👉🏻 Important: Note that other components can be considered:

• For a Manager Position, there is also a 4th component to consider: business needs. If there is no business need for a Manager, the promotion won’t happen. For effectiveness and cost Management, we want to avoid having Managers managing 1-2 people in their teams.
• We do not promote people to manager position during their probation period, but after. The probation period is paid using the current salary, not the future one, we will not issue retro payment to compensate for a probation period (see How to promote an IC to Management Position below)

</aside>

1️⃣ Mastering competencies**: is the promotion candidate fully competent in their current level** (100%) and 80% or more from their next level?

<aside> ☑️ For Manager roles, we expect people to master Leadership and Management skills at their current level before being promoted to the next one.

</aside>

• At Gorgias, you are expected to perform at least 80% of your next level stated on the Growth Tracks to get promoted. Make sure that everyone in your team knows that and what is required of them to get to the next level. Have you collected enough evidence for each of the Competencies of the current & next level for the candidate? Doing so will ensure a rigorous promotion process.
  • You can use the ‘state of competencies’ on the promotion template to guide your assessment and discussion with the team member. Below is an example from the Customer Success Manager Growth Track
• Be sure to review and assess the competencies while working on growth areas with the team member so that they have a clear vision of what they’re good at and what they should do better

Is it fair to other team members?

Before promoting someone, did you create a career growth plan for each of your team members? Maybe they deserve the promotion as well? Will your decision be fair to them? Calibrating inside the same team is the minimum requirement for having a fair promotion process and reducing bias.

<aside> ⚠️ It can be demoralizing for a team to see someone who doesn't deserve it get promoted. You are deciding for a group, not for a single person.

</aside>

2️⃣ Consistently over-performing: is the performance of the employee consistent across multiple quarters?

By overperforming, we mean that we expect people to be exceeding performance expectations in the review cycles consistently.

It's not enough to have one amazing month/quarter and then perform worse in the next quarter. Consistency in performance, measured by Performance Reviews is extremely important, especially for higher levels so make sure you have enough time to observe before deciding to promote. Be accurate in your reviews because they matter in the process. Learn more here ‣

• A good rule of thumb is to consider their entire performance in the past year - has there been at least two quarters of exceeding expectations (not necessarily consecutively)
• Keep in mind that when promoting someone, we don't skip levels, meaning for instance you can't promote someone from L2 to L4. In case of transitioning between teams, your level can be updated and lower though since you may not be meeting the requirements of your current level in your new role.