This question is directed at Mark specifically, though all input of course welcome.
Curious if Mark would be willing to comment on how effective he thinks the recent executive order that will allow federal contractors to freely talk about their salaries will be?
Listening to the "How to get a Raise" podcasts got me thinking how salary is very often a measure of someones skill and they might be getting paid considerably more for the same job, because they are really good at it.
Wondering what the possible unintended consequences of this order might be.
Thanks
Knowing peer salary data is not a good idea
This is an anecdote, but it's framed how I think about salary information ever since.
Early in my career I was a very vocal proponent of knowing what everyone made. There was roughly 6 of us who were tight enough to even raise the subject of disclosing salaries. So we did Here is what happened:
The net of all of this was a team that was functioning fairly well, fell apart after a few months. Eventually, management got involved.
Since then, I'm a very strong advocate of *not* sharing this data. My case is extreme, but I can't think of a positive outcome of sharing your information.
-Dan
Happy Manifesto
I recently read this book: http://www.happy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Happy-Manifesto1.pdf
The book is OK, but he talks in detail of how he publishes all salaries and why it is the best policy.
My take on it is this. The main reason not to do it is that you can't justify discrepancies. This is the case for most organizations where people have been hired in at different times, changed roles up and down, have more or less seniority or are specialized in a highly sought after area. Most companies do not adjust salaries down based on current performance and/or responsibilities or labor market conditions. So, for someone that was hired during a boom time, initial salary may have been high and large raises during the boom time may have inflated their salary. Compare this to someone that came in at a time of high unemployment and few raises. In this case, you could have a significant difference in salary, but not in value to the company. This is a difficult thing to fix, and if there were transparency in salaries, it would be difficult to justify the higher salary. This would likely result in the issues Dan lists above.
I think it may be one of these Utopian ideas that looks good on paper and may work well in a small company where the rules are know upfront and everyone is on board when they join. But, for most companies, it would be extremely difficult to implement.
As a woman in government
As a woman in government contracting, I think it has potential although I can concede that some of that is potential for trouble.
I think I'm more interested in salary growth - the trend - than I am in the actual numbers.
I suspect that everyone in my team got identical-percentage raises for the past several years. Given that I'm a consistent top-performer (or so they tell me), this kinda concerns me. I don't mind (ok, I do mind, just not that much) salary discrepancies, because of the whole internal salary compression/hiring and longevity thing. But... if I'm 5 times more productive than someone else, and we get the same percentage raise, I am actually falling behind in salary, because he gets more actual money than I do in his raise. That concerns me - *that* feels like I'm not being rewarded for my work, whereas the actual salary discrepancy doesn't feel that way. The *increase* in the discrepancy bothers me.
Also, being female... I have to say I'm *really* interested from that perspective. One of the reasons I suspect women (and whoever else) tend not to get paid the same is because *we can't talk about salary* - company policy forbids it - and so women don't *know* if they're paid less. Same with other minorities.
I think salary bands might be better than actual salary, as long as they're meaningful - not '$50k to $100k', but '$50k to $65k, $65k to $80k'. And percentage increases. I *really* want to know if my company does actually reward top performers more, or if they're rewarded the same. If we're given the same raise...it would seem that I could work a lot less and still get the same reward at the end of the year. That's hard to swallow.