I run a small company in India. At first I was inexperienced and thought paying employees lesser was a good strategy because that was considered good business by my peers. Very quickly I realized this was a terrible idea and it's just going to hurt the company in the long run and there was no way I could retain people if they hate me.
We hire freelancers mostly and I now always pay them the fee they ask for without negotiating. We value the time they give us and we make sure they're happy working with us. I've hired people from the US, UK, Spain, India and lots of countries. There have been times when the company was running low on funds and I've borrowed from places to make sure our contractors and employees are paid on time even if there's nothing left at the end of the day.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging about how generous I am. It's just that we believe the people who do our work are the ones making things happen and I believe if we keep at it, good things will happen for everyone in the long run. My peers now call me an idiot and a terrible business man. I've already fired two partners who were interfering with payments to freelancers just so they can get an undeserved bonus. Good riddance. They think I'm doing charity by giving freelancers their asking rates when all I'm trying to do is make our operations sustainable in the long run.
In our country, racing to the bottom with the cheapest prices is the go-to strategy for most companies, and this all happens after paying shit to Employees. Once we started paying employees better rates, we were also able to bump up our costs to clients. I couldn't believe at first that clients are ready to pay what we ask for and there was no need to pay less to our freelancers. If anything, we'll just keep increasing our costs and everyone will do better.
After seeing the posts in this sub about how poorly employees are treated by companies, it's baffling how short-sighted some of these companies are and I don't understand why they chase short-term profits at the expense of their employees' well being. It also worries me that as employees are becoming more and more hostile towards their employers, even good companies will also be negatively looked at.
I don't know what else to say but I'll try to do better.