Recently I posed the question “What do you think about an open Salary policy, total transparency in compensation at a company that is less than 40 people, is this a good idea? Or a recipe for disaster?” I received a Lot of Responses. I can’t Imagine what would have happened if I had asked : “How do you feel about profanity in blog posts?”
“Why don’t you ask our opinion?”
I never expected to receive so much feed back from the Question I posed on Linked in. The image above is just poking fun, becuase honestly the main feeling I got was genuine concern. The responses were passionate, but mostly concerned that I was in a position (which I am not) to make such a policy change, and that if I do it, that I will RUIN the lives of the hypothetical 40 employees. This was pretty touching, my friends, and strangers were very concerned that I would be weilding abusive and destructive power around in the name of “progressive management”. Trust me, I would never do that kind of policy change without consensus from the team. But still I do ulimately think its a good policy. The idea is simple, if you are a strong enough manager, you will deal with the inequity in pay structure. The question is whether you deal with it transparently or just try to deal with it internally and privately. I beleive the latter is not possible. I think having to defend and debate the issues are probably healthy. But just for the record, I thought I’d post a link to the discussion. ALL of the thoughts were considerate. They tended to fall into two camps, those that believed inequalities in pay are part of the deal, and that transparency will Only Exacerbate the problem , or those that thought the transparency would help to solve the inequalities. What was not mentioned is that the manager would have to be a Great Manager, and he or she would have to work hard at fixing the inequalities. Also there would need to be a clearly defined compensation policy in place before you did it. Transparency is pointless if you don’t have a plan for correcting the problems. The middle ground came in the form of an open Salary Range solution which you will find at most major corporations.