How Salary Transparency Can Assist You (and Your Workplace)

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed. Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments.

0:35It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. How much money do you make? And how did you feel when I asked that question? You might be uncomfortable, you might hesitate to answer, or maybe you wouldn't even skip a beat and answer immediately.

1:12Historically, at least in the workplace, money was just something that you didn't talk about, and salaries like those real cold hard numbers, you usually kept those closely guarded. But times are changing, introducing salary transparency. Here at Ascend, the practitioners and experts we've talked to have all kind of emphasized this change in the norm. People are talking about their salaries. I think people don't talk about how much they make enough. I do recommend asking, hey, can we have the salary conversation? Like, I love this new movement towards everybody advertising the job range for every job.

1:49So what has led to this shift and how does help or hurt us by sharing our salaries out loud? So for starters, I make...

2:04A lot of people started to put together the dots on the real corporate reasons for keeping things secret, which is that if you've got pay disparities, you don't have to fix them if no one knows they're there. That's David Berkus. He's an organizational psychologist, former business professor, and he's written a bunch of books about today's workplace. He's also done a lot of research on salary transparency and the impact he can have on both teams and companies. Why is it so taboo to talk about your salary? Yeah, you know, the interesting thing, it's taboo, but only in certain cultures. You know, I found that as all of this work started to spread, certain cultures were like, I don't understand what the big deal is.

2:45I mean, there's Scandinavian countries where you can look up the tax returns of any other citizen and hence no, right? And even the United States where I am, if you work for a union, if you work for any public sector, whether it's local government all the way up to the federal government or the military, everybody knows. In the last couple of years, it really has felt like that norm around salary transparency has been changing. Why do you think it's becoming kind of more common to talk about your salary at work? So I think a couple of things are going on at the same time. I mean, the first is we could point to all sorts of generational shifts, increases in transparency, right?

3:19As people who spent their entire lives on social media, or at least the entirety of their adult lives hit into organizations, they're used to sharing everything. So why is this one taboo, right? I think the other reason is that a lot of people started to put together the dots on the real corporate reasons for keeping things secret, which is that if you've got pay disparities, you don't have to fix them if no one knows they're there. And so about five or six years ago, people started to really figure out that transparency could be a solution to the gender pay gap and other racial and ethnic discrimination gaps.

3:52And so it became not only a push for transparency as a solution in itself, it became a solution to a different and bigger problem. And that's really accelerated it as well. I'm one of those people that grew up sharing my entire life online. Like throw up some of my old tweets here. is it the applesauce one because i'm not ashamed of that i still eat that for breakfast like every single day it makes a lot of sense that people who grew up being super transparent about their lives online they would also want to be transparent about money as well yeah i don't know that i'd walk up to someone on the subway and be like hey how much you pulling down yeah like who who would do that who would just go up to strangers on the street and ask them how much money they make i am hannah williams i run the salary transparent street tiktok account we go interview strangers on the street and we ask them what do they do and how much they make.

4:41I'm a roofer. And how much do you make? About$70 ,000 a year. How much do you make? $78 ,000. What do you all make? $15 an hour. How much do you make? I make$87 ,000. She does exactly that. She was inspired by her own experience with job hopping and salary negotiations and she really saw... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

5:17Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

5:57Shop now at palmolive.com. The benefit of people knowing real concrete numbers. Sometimes the hours of the day differ. Like today, we realize that don't talk to people on their morning commute. They really don't want to talk. The people that say yes, it makes it all worth it. When they share, you can tell that it makes them happy to share because they walk away just really excited about it. Hannah's been going all over the U.S. to talk to people about what they make. But what's the point of talking to strangers about their salaries? Is it just to be fun, to entertain, is it to be controversial, or is it to just go viral?

6:35I mean, holding corporations accountable is not something I ever thought I would say, but it's really, I was inspired by the great resignation. It's amazing that I've only been working three years, and that three years has been incredibly impactful in terms of workers' rights and the workers' rights movement. My ideology has also been influenced by it that I realized that once all workers kind of get on the same page about what we need and what we deserve and what we're going to ask for, there's real impact there. There's real power that can be influenced. You know, companies don't really want to listen to you, but once you have a movement, once you have a lot of people asking for this, change can happen.

7:12So it sounds like there are some benefits to sharing your salary, even with strangers on the street. But what does it actually look like in the workplace? So I'm an organizational psychologist. I've studied teams for most of my career. And that's really where I see the primary benefit of transparency. We all, I mean, first of all, we look at our coworkers all the time and we try and figure out how much they're pulling down, right? We all do it. It's a natural human tendency. The problem is if we don't know the number, we make all sorts of extra assumptions like, oh, that's a nice car they're driving or, oh, I didn't realize they could have that type of watch.

7:47It might've been a gift. You don't know, but you're using all of these little terrible points of data to try and make an assumption about what someone's compensated at. And then there's an entire motivational model called equity theory. What is equity theory? It's basically about motivation and its relation to perceived fairness. So who am I working harder than on my team and how much more money are they making than me? If I don't have those hard numbers, I'm just going to assume the worst. If I don't know, I'm using all sorts of bad data to figure out what they're compensated at. So I'm like I'm guaranteed to be disappointed in my own salary because I'm looking at the slacker on my team and thinking they might actually be paid less than you.

8:26You don't know. So we see a lot of benefits at the team level on a level of cohesion and collaboration when people are able to see it. So I can totally see how salary transparency can lead to a lot of good. But if it's still something that feels weird to you, if it's not something that you want to do, that's totally okay. Your salary is your information and you can do with it what you want and vice versa. If you ask somebody about their salary and they get awkward and don't want to talk about it, that's fine too. It's really sort of the last secret thing in American culture. We're more willing to talk about our romantic lives.

9:01There's an interpersonal conflict. Now the relationship's weird. Now your friendship with that coworker is weird in perpetuity. So you want to figure that out. On your own side, I mean, the biggest drawback, just because I say, as someone who's looked into it and used to teach HR in business school, that it's protected by this act of this year, doesn't mean your organization knows that. Despite it being illegal in the United States to bar people from talking about their salaries at work, some companies may still have rules on the books that prohibit these types of conversations. They're not laws, but they still might have consequences.

9:34I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not giving individual advice here. But most of those conversations are classified as conversations about employment conditions. that's protected by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. So you might still get retaliated for asking all of those questions. You have a legal defense and we have there's multiple cases, even in recent history of people starting that push for transparency, being retaliated against and then winning. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

10:12Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

10:51And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. At arbitration with the National Labor Relations Board and others. But the question is, do you want that battle? But it's not all secrecy when it comes to salaries at companies. Some organizations have taken steps to be more transparent, and some states have even created laws requiring companies to list salary ranges in job descriptions. I do kind of wonder what it would be like to know exactly what my coworkers make. Like, not just the salary range or the bands or whatever, like the exact number.

11:32How would that make me feel? Would I stew over it? Would I obsess over it? Would it just cause, like, absolute chaos? Most of the time we'll hear for those organizations that did it in transition, it was a big deal for like two weeks. And then everybody was like, oh yeah, yeah, I know it. It's whatever. You're telling me I wouldn't be glued to my computer just staring at my co-worker salaries? You sure about that? If you're asking, do we have an open tab of all the salaries of all of our teammates and are we checking it constantly? The answer is a very resounding no. That's Carolyn Koprash. She works at a company called Buffer, a social media management platform that became kind of famous for practicing radical transparency by posting salaries publicly on their website.

12:19I have years of people coming up to me at conferences and saying, I know your salary. And the first time that happened, you know, you kind of jump a little bit, but it's part of the fun, honestly. There are so many benefits to fairness. I mean, our gender pay gap, for example, significantly decreased over time. We think that salary transparency and constantly having these conversations is one of the reasons why. She's not kidding. According to the company's yearly analysis for 2022, the average salary for women at Buffer is$136 ,850. And the average salary for men is$137 ,418, which makes their unadjusted pay gap only 0.41%.

13:04Compare that to the national average in the U.S., which is 17%. So now we kind of know the merits of salary transparency and also some of the awkwardness that might come with it, but what does salary transparency actually look like in practice? The first and kind of most obvious way it comes into play is while doing research on your industry. Presumably the only reason you would do that is if you're trying to figure out what's the market rate for this job in this city, etc. And so there you might just ask that question instead of what you get paid. Hey, I'm trying to figure out what somebody with this amount of experience in this city doing this job would get paid.

13:48Do you have any insights there? Most of the time, they're going to come back and go, well, I've worked in this industry for 10 years and I make around this much. And then you know. Usually you get the offer, you get an offer letter, it has a number on it. And I would coach a lot of them in the sort of before you accept negotiations to say, is that the top of the range for this position? Because they've already given you the offer. So there's only really three possible outcomes. They are, one, it is the top of the range, meaning great, you're not being undercut. Two, it isn't the top of the range, meaning maybe there's some room to negotiate.

14:25Or three, it isn't the top of the range, but they give you a reason why. And now you know. You need to know whether or not they're open to the idea of sharing salaries. So I would actually start there. I would talk to them not about what they get paid, but about how open they are to this idea. Hey, I'm wondering how compensation is really working here and if it's working for us. If I were to lead the charge on trying to get some better data, would you want to be a part of that? You're getting ready for performance reviews. You're getting ready for merit pay conversations or you're getting ready to ask for a raise.

15:01When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments.

15:36It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. One of the questions you could ask, maybe not of your boss, but of somebody in HR, etc., is, hey, as I prepare for this performance evaluation, we talk about my future, possible career path, etc., I'd like to get a little bit more information, not just about what these jobs are, but what their salary ranges are, etc.

16:15So that I can know going in. And maybe they help you, maybe they don't. But you learn something very important, right? If they help you, you know the number. If they don't, you know, maybe I don't want a promotion in this organization. Maybe I want to be successful somewhere else. So moral of the story here, being transparent about your salary in strategic ways can have a lot of benefits that ultimately push organizations to be more equitable. So let's do it. This is the big one. How much money do you make? My accountant tells me that I'll be able to pull about 275 to 300 out of what the business makes to pay myself with.

16:54Thank you for sharing. Oh no. I just broke all of your rules and was just like outright with it. It's not the first time I've been asked that question. I make 231. I feel really awkward doing that. Should I do it a second time just in case? Right now I make$0. When I was a data analyst before I quit this job, I made$115 ,000 a year. Okay, Andy, now you go. I make$80 ,000 a year. Now you go. I make$77 ,000 a year. it doesn't feel like it's that big of a deal it just feels like a number and hopefully it helps somebody out there ask for what they deserve fall has never looked or tasted this good sweet greens fall harvest menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured warm roasted sweet potatoes crisp apples maple glazed brussels and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl maple glazed salmon plate and roasted bacon Brussels side.

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