In my last job I was in a position where I got to see all the salary wrangling that goes on behind the scenes, and it was pretty awful. You get people with power dishing out preferential treatment to their mates, you get situations that are incredibly unfair but for whatever reason can't be easily resolved, and you get a lot of gossiping and speculation that is wildly unproductive for a company. I've never worked anywhere with salary transparency but I'd love to try it - I think with the right people it could work well but I'm sure there's plenty of scope for petty jealousies of other kinds. But I did come away with the fact that the secrecy in many cases is often to hide things that your average worker is going to be offended by, i.e. how much executives are paid.
I've worked for a large company where if you know someone's band (and you generally know that just because you do, not by asking about) and how long someone has been there, you know within about a grand, how much they get paid.
I now work for a place where I'm told to never talk about my salary, yet 5 members of the (very small) company were invited into my salary review.
I often think that the more they stress to not talk about it, the more likely it is I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers.
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In my last job I was in a position where I got to see all the salary wrangling that goes on behind the scenes, and it was pretty awful. You get people with power dishing out preferential treatment to their mates, you get situations that are incredibly unfair but for whatever reason can't be easily resolved, and you get a lot of gossiping and speculation that is wildly unproductive for a company. I've never worked anywhere with salary transparency but I'd love to try it - I think with the right people it could work well but I'm sure there's plenty of scope for petty jealousies of other kinds. But I did come away with the fact that the secrecy in many cases is often to hide things that your average worker is going to be offended by, i.e. how much executives are paid.
I've worked for a large company where if you know someone's band (and you generally know that just because you do, not by asking about) and how long someone has been there, you know within about a grand, how much they get paid.
I now work for a place where I'm told to never talk about my salary, yet 5 members of the (very small) company were invited into my salary review.
I often think that the more they stress to not talk about it, the more likely it is I'm underpaid compared to my coworkers.