There’s still a lot of talk lately about the idea of pay transparency, but many organizations still not willing to take the plunge. Why the hesitancy? One argument I hear is that pay information is personal and it’s a private matter between the organization and employee. Others respond with view that employees just don’t have a need to know what coworkers earn. Or, my favorite, employees can’t be trusted with this kind of information. Therefore, when social media management company Buffer recently announced it was posting salaries online, you can imagine the uproar.
However, as Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne emphasized in a December blog post, “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation for great teamwork.”
Buffer isn’t the only company choosing to share ‘confidential’ information. Thirty-employee SumAll chose to make performance reviews as well as salaries public. They say the program is a success. This may be due to how well they implemented the program. Specifically, they built the right culture as well as developed complementary policies and programs that are transparent as well as defensible.