Should We Know Everyone's Salary?
Why Transparency Alone Won't Heal Corporate Community
Salary transparency is on the rise across the country in states like Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, Nevada, New York State, Washington, and Rhode Island. Basically, this is a good, good thing.
Not that everyone loves the movement. David Wilstermann, a Mode/Switch colleague and a program analyst at Calvin University, worries that pay transparency will make Gen Z postures towards work even more transactional than they already are. Others fear that salary transparency will foster a culture of hyper-competitiveness among workers. Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review note that pay transparency can result in pay reductions, leaving supervisors and employees to negotiate “i-deals,” or idiosyncratic, non-monetary arrangements. Transparency, in such cases, doesn’t necessarily lead to equity.
But on balance, pay transparency seems good for corporate productivity. As organizational psychologist Dr. David Burkus has noted, salary transparency saves cognitive energy: workers don’t spend so much time trying to guess how their coworkers put their kid through college. “If I don’t know, I’m using all sorts of bad data to figure out what they’re compensated at. So I’m guaranteed to be disappointed in my own salary.”
So, hurrah for salary disclosures!
But here’s my question for quarter-life professionals: will transparency across the board produce the kind of workplace you’re hoping for?
Let’s probe this question with a story from Dyvon Melling, a tech company manager and a self-described post-capitalist with a penchant for bluntness.
Right out of college, Dyvon took a position in an entrepreneurial incubator downtown Chicago. His initial attitude was, “I have to set the world on fire with my passion.” But he gradually figured out that he didn’t have the training or the managerial support to do what the position required. “I'd never run anything. They didn't have anybody else doing what they wanted me to do that I could watch. And so, my usual avenues of learning were just gone.”
He left the incubator and became a wanderer and a self-described anti-capitalist. He worked for a small brewery in Idaho, took up with an LA-based company called Tipsy Elves, selling ugly Christmas sweaters. By the time of our interview, he had taken a position in a stealth mode food tech startup, making good money, and managing a team. He quickly started noticing his team members acting as he had in his first job. “I'm biracial,” he noted. “I find that it's still hard for my employees of color—particularly black employees—not to try to figure things out on their own.”
Dyvon told me he addresses this problem with a straightforward managerial style. “I’m often on record in meetings saying, Let's make the implicit explicit.” He figures he can’t afford to be subtle, given the diversity of his dozen-person team. “When you have 10, 11, 12 people, some very young, some in their late 30s, there's just so much that can be missed.” Dyvon’s practice is to hold weekly meetings, thirty minutes with each worker. “I can say anything they need to hear. They can say anything to me.” Too many workplaces, he explained, depend on gossip to get things done. “I don't like any of the shadow stuff,” not least when it comes to salary. “Our company is not very good at paying people, and so I've been pretty transparent about the company’s pay practices.”
All this sounds good, right? I mean, Dyvon’s ethic of transparency makes for a better workplace, right? Well, sometimes not, as he himself explained.
You might remember he was working for a stealth enterprise. His boss had been in the news; you would know his name. But Dyvon wasn’t allowed to talk about him explicitly, due to an NDA. (That was a first for me as an organizational researcher!) But he did tell me a story about how he couldn’t correct his company’s sneakiness by mere transparency. His bosses obviously saw his value as a manager. So they promoted him—and then, in the sometimes weird logic of corporate capitalism, they cut his pay. Dyvon didn’t keep quiet about it. He told his team what had happened.
And for once, this ethic of transparency backfired. His team lost their mojo. Nobody wanted to work. (Research suggests that pay transparency decreases productivity if the company’s pay practices aren’t equitable.)
One takeaway for Dyvon? Managerial blatancy can be a tricky business. “I can be too transparent,” he concedes.
As a communication scholar, I’m mindful that an ethic of complete transparency promises—but can’t deliver—effortless human connection. Historian John Durham Peters has pointed out, western culture has long celebrated an ideal of flawless connectivity. An ethic of transparency holds out similar promise. But, as Peters notes wryly, if we could read each other’s minds, our lives would fall apart.
Transparency in corporate community sounds appealing because it promises to make the interactions of managers and employees into a what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. But the metaphor also suggests passivity. A pane of glass doesn’t do anything; it’s just there. But workplace communication requires a lot of effort. As Dyvon pointed out, managerial interaction entails artfulness and wisdom as much as candor and bluntness. As he put it, “there's a line and a balance, and I think it moves.”
So, managers, let’s talk a minute about a few situations where transparency might not be enough:
Evaluations of employee performance. As a manager, you can’t say everything. I’m not just pointing out that you shouldn’t say everything; I mean, quite literally, you can’t say everything. You might aspire to make your report a perfect reflection of your team member’s work. But as the theorist Kenneth Burke notes, our communications inevitably selects and deflects as well. But this is a good thing! The fact that you as a manager have to select what to say and what not to say pushes you to persuade your employee that this matters more than that. That’s difficult but good work.
Collaboration on complicated projects. Working with others in professional situations sometimes makes you wish to know others transparently well. Your coworkers are great humans: funny, smart, quick, talented. Why not become besties? Sometimes that happens. But often, you just have to jump into the work and pursue the project goals together as well as you can—without achieving the deep and lasting connection that utter relational transparency might afford. If you enjoy an interpersonal connection, good for you! But if you don’t, keep in mind that an ethic of coordination matters more than than an ethic of transparency. In other words, when you do group work you stand next to each other, looking in the same direction, rather than facing toward each other, seeing into each other’s depths.
TDLR emails. Think of the last time a social media platform asked you to click “Agree” to a terms-and-agreement private statement. Did you read the fine print? If you did, you’re an extraordinarily careful person. Keep that in mind as you send written communications to your team. Sometimes, in the interests of being transparent, you end up writing an eight-hundred word email. That sort of excess might be well-intentioned but counter-productive. Instead of a super-long communications, look for ways to briefly but pointedly get people involved. What do your teammates need to know to participate in a project? Put that in your email. Honesty is not the best policy if “honesty” means an exhausting amount of words.
Please don’t hear me saying that transparency has no place in corporate community. But transparency alone is insufficient for good workplace relations. Dyvon told me a difficult story from his first job. He went into his biennial review, thinking he was doing pretty good work. What he got was a multi-page report, complete with dates and times when his managers had been disappointed in his performance. “I was absolutely devastated. Why didn't you tell me these as that happened?” Was this a failure of managerial transparency? Sort of. But the managers could argue that their review document was disclosing everything he’d done wrong. Still, they were failing to practice the timing and tact that would have helped Dyvon develop his potential as a leader. Transparency on its own is a thin value. Managers also need to speak and listen in ways that seek the good and the growth of their teams.
-craig
You may have noticed that the graphics have a simpler character this week. The Mode/Switch Team is between graphic designers. We’ve said farewell to Sarah and hello to Yuxiao Zhang, who’s onboarding soon. Look for her work to start shaping the newsletter as early as next week!