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One issue I have with transparent salaries is that employment is an agreement between the employee and the company: it's a two-way street. Yet when you impleme

by dworin 13y ago

One issue I have with transparent salaries is that employment is an agreement between the employee and the company: it's a two-way street. Yet when you implement transparent salaries, the company is unilaterally deciding to share critical information in that agreement. I am a huge fan of a company transparently sharing its own information with employees. Revenue, profitability, sales, etc... People like to feel like they know what's going on. But it's another to share an employee's information with other employees. There are many people (and I recognize this is a cultural norm, so it differs around the world) who like to keep their salary private, and it should be their prerogative.

MetaCosm 13y ago
Exactly this! Who audits this? It is a corporate "policy" effectively, which the controlling interest can lie in exactly as much as they feel like... transparency for all people not in a place to control the "numbers". This is an insanely one sided arrangement, that can easily be leverage to keep employees in line. "Don't you see that Jim only took a 2% raise this year, do you really think you deserve more than Jim? He has four kids!"
- swombat 13y ago
  It's far more complex and simple than that in our case. The starting point is that 50% of revenue is allocated to "costs": overheads, base salaries, commissions and the bonus pool. How people decide to split that up between themselves is up to them, through a process that itself is open and semi-democratic (getting more so with each round of changes). If anything, I would say that seeing transparency as a weapon of management is really misguided. A manager could always lie and claim that Jim only took a 2% raise this year. With transparency, they can only say that if that is in fact the verifiable truth.
swombat 13y ago
It is absolutely people's prerogative to keep their salaries private from other employees. They can do that easily by working somewhere else. We don't have to employ everybody. In fact, it turns out that being fairly selective of who you employ is widely considered a good thing for startups.

by dworin 13y ago

MetaCosm 13y ago

Exactly this! Who audits this? It is a corporate "policy" effectively, which the controlling interest can lie in exactly as much as they feel like... transparency for all people not in a place to control the "numbers". This is an insanely one sided arrangement, that can easily be leverage to keep employees in line. "Don't you see that Jim only took a 2% raise this year, do you really think you deserve more than Jim? He has four kids!"

swombat 13y ago
It's far more complex and simple than that in our case. The starting point is that 50% of revenue is allocated to "costs": overheads, base salaries, commissions and the bonus pool. How people decide to split that up between themselves is up to them, through a process that itself is open and semi-democratic (getting more so with each round of changes). If anything, I would say that seeing transparency as a weapon of management is really misguided. A manager could always lie and claim that Jim only took a 2% raise this year. With transparency, they can only say that if that is in fact the verifiable truth.

swombat 13y ago

It is absolutely people's prerogative to keep their salaries private from other employees. They can do that easily by working somewhere else. We don't have to employ everybody. In fact, it turns out that being fairly selective of who you employ is widely considered a good thing for startups.