Should Salaries be Revealed or Kept Hidden?
How many people at your workplace know your salary? Wait, let us reverse the question. How many colleagues’ salaries do you know? Up till now, most of the people have believed that salaries should be kept hidden because it can lead to professional jealousy in the workplace.
The industry experts claim that if everyone knew everyone else’s salary, it would lead to animosity between colleagues, and this would negatively affect the employer. It is believed by many in the recruiting industry that revealing salaries can lead to inferiority or superiority. Colleagues will also lose interest when they realize they have been working really hard, but compared to others, are just not getting enough.
Do you agree with the above? We did too until we came across a really interesting example. A social media management firm that has been recently established tried something new. They published the salaries of all their team on their online blog, and also revealed the equations through which they calculated these salaries.
What do you think was the effect of this? Did the company have to suffer because severe animosity rose among the employees? Actually, it was nothing like this, and surprisingly, the consequences were positive. As soon as the company made the salaries public, an increased number of applications started pouring in. Thirty days from that date, the company had received over 2,800 applications whereas 30 days before they only had 1,200 applications, which shows a significant difference, higher than 50%.
Here are a few thoughts that were shared by this company:
Revealing salaries makes people perform to their maximum potential
The social media management firm has a bootcamp period in which every newly employed individual must go through. The main purpose of this period is to get the individual adjusted to the company’s culture and gel in with their existing. Since none of these underperform, the new employees also do not.
Revealing salaries promotes trust
The content marketing head seemed absolutely sure that revealing salaries promoted trust. Everyone could openly talk about their pays, and there were no worries of speculations of any sort.
Revealing salaries does put some pressure… but for the good
Since customers also know the salaries, they are aware of the profits of the company. As such, it takes a little convincing to get them to deal, but that does mean improving quality and increasing motivational levels.
Source: www.aol.com