Alhassan Elbarasse is a recovering actuary, now situated in HR, he uses data to make connections, tell a story, deliver evidence-based solutions, improve the bottom line of the business and enhance the lives of employees.
As the Vice President of Human Resources – Total Rewards, Alhassan manages compensation, benefits, wellbeing, and executive compensation functions at a global business process outsourcing organization providing services.
Alhassan lives outside of Washington, DC, and enjoys doing anything outdoors with his wife and twin 9-year-old daughters.
More from Alhassan…
When it comes to raising minimum wage, there are steps that need to be taken and measures that need to be considered. Alhassan explains how a little psychology and math went putting this into effect.
“First, to demonstrate the connection between minimum wage and people’s needs and being able to show up to work and ultimate happiness, we base it off Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Those are anchored by security and safety and you don’t have security or safety if you don’t have income that can support you or your lifestyle. We built that and we established that as a common ground. We all agree that people need baseline security and safety through income in order to be productive and productive employees and engaged employees.
Once we built off that, then we relied on linear progression, which is a mathematical concept that we used in the past. To explain in simplest terms, all boats rise with the tide. If you increase one, you should increase the ones who are related to it and who are next in line. Those two concepts– boiling it down to their basic terms and something finance people salespeople, customers, anybody can understand and relate to– made the conversation much easier.”
