Editor's Note: In the Classic post, we toast (roast?) those organizations who manage to pull off a kind of perfect schizophrenia in their approach to pay communication.
Don't think it's possible? I'm here to tell you that it's easier than it seems. In fact, I am struck by the number of companies that manage to pull it off.
How can you be both transparent and secretive at the same time? Let me share a few examples.
You can distribute well-crafted, multi-colored and detailed total compensation statements that include such helpful information as an employee's pay grade, salary range and current compa-ratio. This at the same time that you are maintaining a completely opaque, black box of a job evaluation approach that combines peeking at market data with some type of jerry-rigged point factor system, the administration of which cannot be easily explained or defended because it is half voodoo. So, while employees can know their salary ranges, neither HR or their manager can tell them the rationale by which they were placed in their current pay grade in the first place.
You can hold regular employee shop talks, where you share information on the company's business outlook, even provide high level financial and operating data, encouraging employees to partner with leaders in making the company successful. This while holding all employee bonus plan decisions close to the vest, claiming that awards are based on performance, but never committing to any specific set of metrics or formula, preferring instead to make a discretionary last-minute call at year-end, so that employees are never sure what to expect until the check - if there is a check - is distributed.
You can even be so boldly open as to publish every employee salary, all of them for anyone to see, while also granting sporadic, significant salary adjustments to individuals based on a process and criteria that are never talked about and so appear to be completely arbitrary and capricious.
Even in the most open and transparent environments, there are things (particularly in the realm of compensation) that should be kept private. On the other hand, we need to be mindful of our apparent tendency to compartmentalize transparency. Employees can connect the dots, even if we can't, and we run the risk that our practices of secrecy in one area will undermine our efforts to be transparent in all others. The net effect may be that employees become hesitant to trust any of the information we share.
Ann Bares is the Editor of Compensation Café, Author of Compensation Force and Managing Partner of Altura Consulting Group LLC, where she provides compensation consulting services to a wide range of client organizations. She earned her M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and enjoys reading in her spare time. Follow her on Twitter at @annbares.
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How can you be both transparent and secretive at the same time? Let me share a few examples - good observation in relation to organizations
Posted by: Odundo Eric | 06/29/2017 at 05:17 AM