The Center for American Progress reports:
SumAll, a data analytics company, makes all of its employees' compensation public to everyone in the company.
[...]
when he started SumAll three years ago, [CEO Dane Atkinson] and his core team decided to make transparency a "foundational concept", from compensation to documentation to reviews. "We made sure everyone had a chance to see what was happening in the business", he said. And there have been many quantifiable benefits to the company's performance ever since."The real benefits where you get money back from your team is in much more productivity... a much higher degree of trust", he said. People are less focused on trying to figure out if they're being paid fairly and more focused on their jobs. "It's stunning how much stress exists in the workplace around compensation, how much time is spent by employees trying to be treated fairly", he said. "When you take that all away, it's not only more productive for the company but a huge relief on the team."
Productivity is also boosted because workers don't feel compelled to impress the boss to get a raise or to move up, but to do work that will be recognized by everyone, given that it's made clear up front how and when they'll get increases.
"They strive to achieve in the eyes of the people that really matter... not just make me the CEO feel good", he said. And with all of the company's financials out in the open, employees often help make decisions to boost the bottom line. "You end up getting a much bigger brain trust for running the business", he said.
[...]
"Our expectation is over the next decade the tech industry will be the lead for it, but we believe [this transparency] will be adopted more widely", he said. "It works, so things that work in efficient systems tend to get taken to."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Saturday June 28 2014, @08:05PM
That's an understatement. In most places I've worked at, people were very worried about money on two axes: their own pay (compared to the "industry average", or not) and the pay of others. The second one being -IMO- the most damaging, by far.
I've never worked anywhere where transparency existed. The only thing that exists in france is the use of fixed grids for wages (in big companies & government) that, in fact, don't solve the problem.
But, that doesn't prevent people from asking, or sometimes seeing the numbers when some idiot lets ALL the excel files accessible via a share (happened at least twice in 2 different companies).
And knowing (by asking them) what other people make did NOT make me -nor my coworkers- happier!
Because that's when you learn that the totally moronic guy in the next room, who is a total incompetent but -somehow- managed to pretend that he is a project manager -a big joke- makes 50% more than you. For the same job basically, except, he doesn't do his. That makes one feel angry. Or learning that the new hires (beginners, right out of school), who are really BAD (not inexperienced, bad), start at the same salary than me (one the 5 most experienced in the company). And when after months of work & formation, they still are crap and show an impressive amount of stupidity, (you wonder what they learned at the school/university and how they got the diploma), you then ask yourself, "Is that a joke?". This led me to resign in the end.
What's the point of being competent and dedicated if any idiot gets the same salary just for showing up in the morning?
I think that the "ignorance is bliss" saying may hold true in some cases.
Opacity is bad, but Transparency can be a killer as well.
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Saturday June 28 2014, @08:39PM
I have experienced this too. Many of my colleagues were more interested in knowing what the other guy earned rather than worrying about what they were contributing to the company's bottom line. I am reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org] ).
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 2, Informative) by NullPtr on Saturday June 28 2014, @09:47PM
That's because knowing what other people earn gives you information you can use to get a higher level of pay yourself. You could ask your boss for a raise based on it, or - if you can't mention that you know - at least you know that your boss knows how much various employees earn. I'm not sure how you measure how much someone worries about what they contribute to the company, and - if it were possible - how you'd be able to gauge how that concern matches their interest in other's pay, but I suspect that very few employees are remotely concerned the the former. It's not my problem to deal with that; that's something for my superiors/HR to deal with.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 28 2014, @10:42PM
policies involving keeping employee pay secret are management technique used to turn employees against each other, and a way to make sure they can pay people as little as possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:57AM
if you're worried how much you're earning or how much your colleagues are earning, you're probably not earning enough to satisfy yourself so should do whatever you can to increase your salary regardless.
salary often reflects the ability of someone to sell themselves. trying to force salary equality eliminates competition and motivation to improve, and is akin to socialism. history has repeatedly shown this concept to fail. competitive individuals will also simply find another way to get ahead anyway so the whole effort would be largely moot.
humanity strives from competition. it is a tendency of nature in general ("survival of the fittest").
everyone loves to whine about not being paid enough, but only socialist pigs make themselves feel richer by forcing others to become poorer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @02:27AM
You say that like its a bad thing.
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Saturday June 28 2014, @09:02PM
Perhaps the idea of the transparency policy is that it shows the employer is valuing the workers who perform well. With transparency comes pressure on the employer to doll out fair salaries for work done. If the employer fails to do this then, as in your anecdote, they risk losing the employees who actually know what they're doing.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 28 2014, @10:51PM
Opacity can hide problems - if your organization runs better with problems hidden, it must not need to be very efficient.
A "binary shift" as radical as fully opaque to fully transparent would be a shock to most systems, which is why it's so bad when the spreadsheet gets leaked.
In the end, transparency would lead to fairer compensation for the experienced and valuable - and, like most people, I _know_ I am above average, so I am sure it would be good for me...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @01:08AM
might be a lot worse for you if you find out most of your colleagues are on a lower salary.
you'll probably find that this so called "transparency" has ulterior motive... it means the company only has to pay the same salary to all employees at each level, so they have an excuse when someone comes to them and says "i want a pay rise"; they simply answer "i'm sorry we can't do that because it would be unfair to your colleagues and we publish all our salaries so if we post yours as higher you would be targeted as a brown nose" (or something like that).
it also makes longer term budgeting easier if salaries are more consistent.
be assured that there is always a business decision governing any such 'transparency'.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 28 2014, @09:20PM
This obsession with what everyone is getting paid seem strange to me, can anyone explain the obsession with this beyond "do I get paid at least industry average for my field?" (assuming the average for the field is a decent pay)
(Yes, I want to know since this obsession is alien to me - this is not trolling but a genuine desire to understand this)
(Also, would be interesting to know in which cultures/countries this obsession exist and where it is absent)
(Score: 2) by skullz on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:09AM
In my jobs it has been an obsession with only knowing part of the equation. I and meany of my coworkers know that we are working harder, being smarter, and are better looking than Joe Slacker but we don't know (but suspect) that effort and monetary reward are not correlated. In some cases I've actually seen this to be true, others you are left wondering. A pat on the back and "nice job" speech is good and all but as the saying goes money talks. If Joe Slacker, aka Mr. Ideas, is getting paid twice what I am and me and my coworkers are doing all the work I start to question if it is really worth it to do more than the bare minimum not to get fired. It is a fundamental return on investment. My hard work may make or break a project but if management doesn't see to match that with something that counts why bother? They aren't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:26AM
You could have covered it in 7 words:
Getting paid less than a slacker sucks.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by skullz on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:48AM
And if this were Twitter I could have done that but this web based free form medium allows me to express my thoughts and experiences fully in depth with additional experiences from coworkers who have experienced similar situations while working on related projects all the while being under the thumb of an insecure and frankly disruptive management stooge who wouldn't know how to lead (or manage) if it was a two by four to the face and who uses infighting and fear to control individuals who are better equipped to actually get the job done than they are, probably because that is the only way they have gotten anything in life, which is sad.
tl;dr: Yeah.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday June 29 2014, @08:35AM
So, if I am to extend this it means the culture where you are "we only work for the paycheck and have no pride in a job well done"?
Also, in the case you stated above wouldn't it all have been better if noone obsessed about the pay and didn't care about if the Slacker was paid more? I mean, in that case the suspicion and disconent about him _possibly_ being paid more wouldn't be there in the first place and it would have been a happier workforce that had more time spent on working and socializing instead of engaging in office-politics and gossip? (regardless of if he was paid more or not the very notion he _might_ be paid more causes the disconent and ruins the mood of the workplace, and it actually would do this [in a system with transparent salaries] even if he was paid less but a rumour was started that was allowed to use a company car [which could be started by the boss simply allowing him to use it to more quickly reach a sick child at daycare])
Also consider that many programmers suck at negotiating, which means that their pay slowly would fall behind the pay of those that are better at negotiating (and sometimes worse at programming) and over time this would cause a significant difference, so should we either: a) fire everyone now and then b) disallow salary-negotiations c) set salaries by collective agreements d) set up a highly automated system which will be gamed e) something else, please specify.
But still, just why does it matter if someone else is paid more?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 29 2014, @11:42AM
"But still, just why does it matter if someone else is paid more?"
In a world of grind games and metric optimization, if money were utterly useless tokens, many/most people would certainly kill each other over getting a bigger number. But in the real world, where money = quality of life, or even life itself WRT health care and food and quality of neighborhood .... naah I'm sure nobody would care LOL
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday June 29 2014, @03:08PM
Are things really that bad outside of the nordic countries? That people don't get paid enough to live, that healthcare isn't a basic thing, and I am stumped at the food-part since scandinavia is expensive when it comes to food.
But yeah, I guess I should have re-iterated from my first post "(as long as it is a decent pay)".
But you only listed basic items; if you get paid enough to live comfortably(not necessarily in luxury) - then just why does it matter if someone else is paid more?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 29 2014, @03:29PM
So, in summary, if you exclude basic needs which many can't afford, and exclude anything enjoyable "not necessarily in luxury", and further seem to assume that the basic needs if met are purely binary either you don't have them at all or are fully and utterly satisfied (rather than the more realistic situation where you can always aspire to somewhat better food, neighborhood, health care, etc.) Then once you've excluded everything such that nothing is left, then is there nothing? Yes, there seems to be nothing and you are correct.
As a math analogy, you've got the stereotypical number line, and you're saying if you exclude all negative numbers, and there is no such thing as a positive number range merely a binary logical function "Not a negative" which is also specifically excluded, then is there any part of the number line left? Well, no, obviously not.
I'm not sure if this is useful in any way, of course, but that's how I'm interpreting your questions. Well, yes, yes, there are in fact 30 bazillion great, excellent, useful reasons, but if we just individually exclude all of them and keep on excluding every new topic as they come up, then, yes, there is in fact nothing left... given a set of very peculiar rules and preconditions...
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday June 29 2014, @05:31PM
That people care about how much they make themselves I understand.
But what I don't understand is why they care how much someone else make and that is what I'm trying to figure out, just why do people even care how much someone else make?
(I can understand it if someone is living in poverty and a co-worker lives comfortably, but if oneself lives comfortably [which I would assume of a worker in a tech-company in the western world] then why care about what someone else make? [as long as they also can live comfortably])
Or put it another way. If someone makes 75k USD , then what does it matter if a coworker makes 70k a year or 80k*, or even 100k?
(* = accoding to http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Programmer&l1= [indeed.com] is seems that average salary is 79k per year for a programmer)
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Sunday June 29 2014, @03:39PM
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday June 29 2014, @05:35PM
Thank you, that explained the obsession with it in USA.
(Score: 1) by Stuntbutt on Sunday June 29 2014, @02:52AM
Imagine starting a job with minimal skills, doing well, getting promoted.
2 years later, New College grads get hired. This wave of NCGs has no experience - at or below where you started, 2 years ago.
They start at the paygrade you started out with (as mentioned, you've been promoted, so you're @ NCG + 1 level).
Now... brace for this...
Imagine they make **25%** more than you. Not 5%. Not 10%. Lower level, less experienced, generically educated, and it's a "policy" to hire like this. 25% more than experienced employees. 10% than some senior employees.
Yeah. That's where it comes from. some people are paranoid about it happening. Some people have it ACTUALLY happen (like me).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @06:15AM
if that happened to me, i would be asking myself "what does he have that i don't?"
if you don't care to answer that honestly, then you're merely lying to yourself by thinking you're as good or better than him
(Score: 1) by fadrian on Sunday June 29 2014, @10:54PM
And, if you think that performance bonuses or raises are allocated on a basis of performance, you're wrong - they're almost always allocated in a way that minimizes potential turnover, which may or may not reflect performance more than indirectly. The reason for the salary difference might be due to performance differentials and it might be due to as little as as that one person was hired in a boom, while the other wasn't. And I will say, as one who has seen these numbers at a managerial level, that it can take literally years to realign salaries for some of these cyclical economic issues. No, compensation in the US is nowhere close to rational (which is what you're postulating) and, if you think that, well... you're just wrong.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday June 29 2014, @07:41AM
(Sorry for the odd phrasing, I'm having a quite high fever at the moment)
Thank you for explaining the effect, but it doesn't really explain the obsession with it.
Just to take a very current example. Recently there was a quite big strike in southern sweden (we have very strong workers unions) regarding pay and types of employment in the railroad-sectors, two of the many parts that came out of the agreement for this is higher introductionary pay and a faster increase in salaries.
So, people should suddenly be very unhappy because the unions recently negotiated a better deal for the entire field and that they joined up before the changes? (trying to get it to affect everyone would have gotten the negotiations into an even worse deadlock and noone would have gotten improvements)
-
However, the basic question still exists, if you are getting paid enough and it is a decent salary then just why does it matter if someone else earns more? (Or is it some weird thinking where people's worth only are as big as their paycheck? [and to take the extreme of this - when steve jobs only had a $1 pay from apple, did this make his work worthless?])
What I'm trying to get to I guess is the question "Why does it matter if someone else is getting paid more?"
(Score: 1) by waterbear on Saturday June 28 2014, @09:51PM
I suspect transparent-pay policy is likely to form just one part of a larger array of good management/leadership behaviors. Focus on money and pay seems pretty much a permanent fact of (many) human lives, it has to be handled somehow.
Among bad managers/leaders that I have known, several have used preoccupations with pay for different kinds of indirect manipulation of people. Straightforward management and leadership would have been preferable. I can't see such people tolerating the introduction of transparent pay.
-wb-
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday June 28 2014, @10:45PM
Back in '90/'91 I went to work for a company working on government contracts. Got the standard "talking about yours or other's salary is cause for dismissal". Due to some government rule, on all the bulletin boards they listed the salary range for each job title. There were a lot of job titles, I was something like "Software Engineer 3". The catch is, all job titles had a range of roughly $3k. So knowing I was an SE3 everyone knew I made between $48k and $51k.
That company sucked. When I started I estimated the job would take about 6 months from design to coding to test to documentation to training. I was there for 13 months and never wrote a line of code. We wrote a ton of documentation. One time we had a doc review and the government flew 15-20 people out from Virginia for a week long meeting. Never discussed anything technical. Instead, it was all "this should be section 1.2.3.1, not 1.2.4". Total waste of time and money. This wss when I updated my resume and started looking for another job.
For Halloween the company president sent around a memo saying anyone who showed up in costume would be fired on the spot.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:16AM
listed the salary range for each job title
Every Federal employee has a rating and there is a corresponding pay range.
United States federal civil service#Pay systems [wikipedia.org]
If you're a GS-8, your co-workers know that and have a pretty good idea how much you take home.
It's worked for nearly half a century.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 29 2014, @11:56AM
Another example is .mil salaries. My first "job" right out of HS was basically being a minicomputer sysadmin (yes, this was a very long time ago, decades). Every E-4 in the Army Reserves made pretty much the same to the penny, because we even had the same state taxes, being reserves...
It wasn't a big deal in practice, or at least not enough to create a discussion.
As you'd guess, if you can't optimize the numeric salary result you tended to optimize promotion packet points (does .mil still do that?) and also optimize slots. So in theory all slots have a max rank and a MOS and they're theoretically identical. Obviously they are not equal in any way in reality, and there's massive open allocation optimization and battles for who gets which slot. Toward the end I had to decide and politic, should I be top non-nco / top tech on night shift or just another grunt day shift, I chose night shift but ... its complicated... were we deployed that would have resulted in lots of lost sleep, also being what amounts to team lead is a lot of extra work for no reward, other than obviously not having to work under someone else as team lead...
There was also massive optimization in secondary duties. So I was the squad 60 gunner (cool, although if they need a sysadmin type to man a '60 then we're obviously totally F'ed and that we still used '60s gives you some idea how long ago this was because those are two generations of weapons systems obsolete... all I remember is cleaning it was a PITA and palm up when pulling the charging handle...). And that was a backhanded compliment anyway as they assigned 60 gunner duty by weight and as a weightlifter I always flunked weigh in on the simplistic height/weight chart and got "taped" for BMI (which I (almost) always passed) so ...
So in practice public salary is not a big deal, although all the drama and politics merely are pushed out of salary negotiations and into job allocations and titles.
(Score: 1) by Schafer2 on Sunday June 29 2014, @12:52AM
Remember NeXT, home of the cool magnesium cube computers? That was Jobs' next company after John Sculley kicked him out of Apple.
At NeXT, Jobs experimented with a number of compensation plans, with, if I recall, all of them being open to all the other employees. "Sure, you can go look up Jane's salary, stock, sign-on bonus, etc."
I expect those that were better compensated liked it better than those that were not.
(Score: 1) by Bobity on Sunday June 29 2014, @01:28AM
In my experience the biggest issue for techos is with management, who too often don't understand what techos need to work well. Amongst these needs is concern about remuneration being fair. However just publishing everyone's wages is not enough on its own. If you are going for transparency then it needs to be across the board. Ricardo Semler in Brazil did a lot of the trail-blazing in this area, and his books (e.g. 'Maverick') show how far he went and the successes he had. Recommended reading, though it might make you unhappy with your management.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 29 2014, @03:46PM
I want to see the list of people management is going to fire next. That's the only list that matters. All management has one. They decide what kind of bonuses they want, and see who they can fire to free up that much money.