From Our Friends
Do You Know What Your Co-Worker Makes?
11:30 am, February 1st | by Gabrielle Karol, LearnVest
In an age where cubicles are getting taken down for open office layouts (like LearnVest’s!), it seems that the idea of “openness” is being taken to the next level: salary information. The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of private-sector companies are choosing to reveal formerly secret numbers to employees.
Company financials, staff evaluations—even details about workers’ salary and bonuses—are put out into the open, in the spirit of freeing up anxieties about co-workers’ pay and creating a clearer sense of how each team member contributes to the company as a whole.
We’ve raised the question before of whether it can be beneficial to talk openly about your salary with friends or co-workers, or whether it just stirs up more problems.
And it seems that there’s no clear answer: Some of the employees interviewed by The Journal who work for more transparent companies call the access to information “empowering,” while some business owners who had attempted openness found that it wasted time and hurt the hiring process, as attractive applicants couldn’t be wooed with salary increases without causing angst among current staffers.
Additionally, Ed Lawler, the director of the Center for Effective Communications at the University of Southern California said that openness can be detrimentally time-consuming or expensive, as employees try to weigh in on decisions regarding the company’s direction—or salary discussions—where formerly they would have just concentrated on their own work.
What do you think? Would you want to know your co-workers’ salaries and your company’s in-depth financials—or do you prefer to be kept in the dark?
This post originally appeared on LearnVest. It has been republished with permission.
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