Discretionary Funding Eligibility

Owned by Hussain Abbas
Last updated: May 04, 2023 by Vishakha Pinge
3 min read

From Hussain - This document intends to create an environment of fairness considering the real scenarios where people can go above and beyond their roles and/or expectations that make someone eligible to receive any benefit from discretionary funds available to any Service Area. I hope this makes it easier to understand what circumstances and actions make it possible for you to build impact and get rewarded.

Impact

The rewards distributed from the https://axelerant.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OA/pages/2201452572 are, like the name suggests, discretionary on the director. The general principle is that the reward is proportional to the impact of the action on Axelerant or the service area. This also depends on the time. For example, supporting recruitment activities during a long pipeline or weekend hiring drives is more impactful than relatively quieter times.

Efforts

Generally speaking, the rewards are not proportional to the efforts. There is a greater reward in achieving an objective quickly and delivering impact sooner. Furthermore, a significant effort that does not deliver any impact is useless. Learnings derived from a failure can be considered as impact, but the rewards are subjective and based on the director's discretion.

Good examples of meaningful effort.

KPI’s

Any activities that generate impact to Axelerant must not be done at the expense of the individual KPIs. That is to say; we don’t support or reward the person who is performing poorly on a project and yet taking up additional activities. The job assigned to you comes first.

That said, we understand that there are different aspects of not meeting KPI’s and the first instance of failure doesn’t necessarily make you ineligible from receiving rewards from discretionary funding. As mentioned before, this will be at the discretion of the director.

Eligibility Criteria

The general essence of this document boils down to rewarding high-impact outcomes beyond the role expectations. For example, if you are a Drupal Engineer, activities that benefit projects or the Drupal practice at Axelerant done within the ~176 hours per month is not generally considered outside role expectation. On the other hand, if you are spending a non-trivial amount of time after a fully allocated project, that is certainly eligible. A good example of this is participating in interviews and writing frequent blog posts of high quality.

Here are a few more indicative examples of eligibility or lack thereof.

  • Eligible: Making non-trivial contributions to the service area initiatives while working full-time on a project.

  • Eligible: Designing programs or improvement plans while being in a non-management role. This is tempered by the amount of time you have available outside of your project commitments.

  • Eligible: Writing meaningful and contextual blog posts while working full-time on a project.

  • Eligible: Presenting a session that generated a high impact in either the community or our revenue efforts.

  • Eligible: Even when you’re not on a project full-time, the effort you spend outside the 40 hours per week or 176 hours per month is considered for rewards using the discretionary funds.

  • Ineligible: Any of the above when you are not on a project and are on the bench.

  • Ineligible: Any additional initiatives when you have not met your KPI requirements for a significant amount of time.

  • Ineligible: Completing service area initiatives while sacrificing project or team commitments.

Rewards

The budget available to each service area is defined within https://axelerant.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OA/pages/2201452572. The budget covers the rewards discussed here and also indirect spending at the directors or delegated leader's choice. At the moment, there is no fixed percentage allocated between external spending and internal rewards.

Furthermore, the rewards are proportional to the impact and only weakly related to the efforts. As described in the eligibility criteria above, only efforts above 40 hours per week or 176 hours per month are considered when the impact is within the individual’s role. However, if the impact is not within the individual’s role expectations, the impact is rewarded regardless of project commitments.

Special cases

We may launch certain programs where we exempt these conditions for a fixed window of time. For example, in June 2021, we announced a reward for delivering sessions at events such as DrupalCon. Such cases are exempt from the requirements of working on a project full-time.

The final word

I realize this is a situation that is fraught with the dangers of misunderstanding, favoritism, bias, and similar problems. We can’t claim to be free of these human frailties. To that end, I ask you to share feedback whenever you feel our actions in distributing these rewards have led to an unfair outcome. This is especially important to me personally and a source of learning. Thank you for making an effort to build a more inclusive, rewarding, and fair culture at Axelerant.