People and culture

The Open Contracting Partnership exists to transform public contracting. Our small team of highly talented, globally-minded professionals is critical to delivering that mission. We are firmly committed to supporting each and every team member to learn, develop and grow with us and to thrive.

Here are our principles that we are guided by and hold ourselves accountable for:

  1. We are building an exceptional and diverse global team. 
  2. We value fairness, equity and consistency. 
  3. We aim to attract and retain the best talent. 
  4. We invest in professional and personal growth. 
  5. We foster and support high performance. 
  6. We encourage our team to be bold and ambitious. It is better to set a bold goal and fall short than a cautious one.  
  7. We reward both growth and performance.

Our roles

Every single role makes a meaningful contribution every day and supports our mission and our drive for impact. We have six different roles:

  1. Officers – doing vital operations work to keep OCP running and working with our Head of Finance and our directors to manage the money and back-office functions for OCP.
  2. Managers – frontline team members delivering specific activities or programs for OCP, in charge of day-to-day tactical delivery.
  3. Senior Managers – frontline team members executing a whole suite of goods, services and tactics in a region or area and helping to craft the strategy for wider impact.
  4. Heads of – setting and overseeing strategy, teams and budgets for a whole area of OCP’s work and working to bring in new resources to scale OCP’s work.
  5. Director I roles lead key functional programs, manage key teams and budgets. They play a critical role in leading a function across the whole organization. In addition to that, they also contribute to OCP’s strategy, fundraising and organisational set-up as part of our Management Team (although the bulk of their time is focussed on functional delivery across OCP programs).
  6. The Director II (Deputy Executive Director), and the Executive Director, lead on strategy, fundraising and organisational structure and function. In practice, this means they spend much of their time on OCP’s culture, systems, performance and best use of our resources.

Our processes 

We translate these principles into some core practices and processes so everyone at OCP knows what to expect.

Compensation – we apply our principles to set pay using our public salary bands. We have a transparent and fair process to review performance, competencies and growth and link them to compensation. We do regular market reviews and annual salary reviews to make sure our salaries are fair.

Performance, competencies and growth – we value results (=performance), modeling values (=competencies) and professional development (=growth). We embrace coaching to grow in all of these three areas and review our development in all three areas in our annual reviews.

Coaching, collaboration and communication – we value continuous constructive feedback, we have regular check in meetings throughout the year to help each other be our best even when things get challenging.

Learning – we offer professional development and support our managers to be great people managers through HR coaching.

Our salary bands

Why salary bands

To help live our HR principles, we conducted market research to understand what our roles are typically paid with reference to a high performing group of global peers. This provided us with salary bands to position the compensation of our highly talented people.

What are they?

Based on this market research and with our advisory board we set our salary bands in August 2020 at:

Grading Minimum Midpoint Maximum
Executive $165,309 $203,544 $236,156
Deputy ED
$145,000 $180,000 $215,000
Director II $134,946 $169,807 $196,796
Director I $118,078 $143,942 $169,807
Head of $101,210 $118,640 $136,071
Senior Manager $84,341 $96,711 $112,455
Manager $64,099 $78,719 $93,338
Officer $52,854 $66,348 $79,843

 

Our approach to diversity

At the Open Contracting Partnership, we highly value diverse talent to help further our mission and work around the world. We currently operate in various countries and timezones, and we actively seek to understand each other – our cultures, our communication and how we best work together.

We continuously seek diverse people, and a space where they can fully contribute their unique perspectives and challenge us to go further. As such, we have the following already in place:

  • Recruitment. We want to attract diverse people from a range of backgrounds to our organizations. Therefore we advertise all roles through a range of channels to attract a diverse pool of candidates for every role.
  • Performance and compensation. We have carefully created a performance review and compensation process that is fair and transparent. We have also built in a whole organization review point, where we will look at data across our team to check for any potential biases e.g. gender, cultural and linguistic diversity.
  • Learning and growth. We have committed to working with our team to understand specific things we need to work on, and learning on unconscious bias and forming an inclusive diversity strategy that is relevant to OCP.

We are currently developing our diversity strategy and approach which we will update to our website shortly.