Would you want your colleagues at work knowing how much you were paid?
A small group of people at Google decided to create a spread sheet to compare their salaries. While they’re at it, they decided to upload the document to a shared repository where other employees can access it. In less than a day, there is a massive response, with huge numbers of employees not only revealing how much they earn on the spreadsheet, but other details such as their bonus and other compensation schemes.
Imagine something like that happening where you work, or trying to do the same yourself. And we’re not talking here about gross salary, about who earns more or less, but the complete spread sheet that makes it possible to compare on what basis bonuses are paid, which bosses get the biggest pluses, and to see the pay differences not just between people in different departments or positions, but on the basis of race, gender, etc.
US labor law makes it illegal to try to stop employees from sharing details about their pay, although many companies include discretion clauses in their contracts. This one-sided information policy is a key tool in the managing of the workforce: it is only from a certain height that everybody else can be properly observed.
Which leads us to ask whether such transparency is actually a good thing. Do we want all companies to be run in this way? We are seeing a steady pressure within society and from shareholders for greater transparency, and more and more companies are now being held to their obligation to make public the pay of certain directors or teams. That said, the salaries of employees tends to be seen as being subject to privacy legislation, and it is unusual for it to made public in the mass media.
Obviously, what a person earns can be the result of a great many circumstances. The idea that all people working at a certain level in a certain occupation should earn the same is, to say the least, simplistic, if not contrary to all logic, and can only be applied properly to certain posts where output is easily measurable. Beyond the question of productivity, it seems clear that there are many other factors that could lead one person to be paid more than another for doing the same job.
Simply bringing somebody in from another company, which happens all the time, can mean having to offer that person more money, but there are any number of other reasons that can affect how much money you take home at each month, and at the end of the year, or for joining a company.
Companies have to balance a lot of interests: their clients’ shareholders’ and workers’ all of which are subject to myriad other questions, which are changing all the time. For a company like Alibaba.com to tell its employees in a letter shortly before its IPO that its scale of priorities will always be, “the customer first, the employee second, and the shareholder third” sound romantic, but it would be interesting to see how that pans out in salary terms, because there are clearly potential conflicts therein.
Is what’s happened at Google the beginning of a trend or an isolated event? What would happen in your company if a large number of people made public their salaries? What would happen if the company adopted a policy of publishing salaries internally? From a management perspective, do you think it would be a good thing for everybody to know what everybody else is earning?
(En español, aquí)
