Businesses should become radically transparent, open, and honest – even about salaries
Slowly but surely, the secretive, paternalistic corporate culture of the past is being infiltrated by a new approach that embraces the concept of radical transparency.
There’s a new breed of organisation that thrives on the notion of having no secrets from its employees, its customers, or any other stakeholders.
These companies share every last detail of their profit and loss, they share information about their employees’ performance, they take pride in being honest and candid with colleagues, and even share details about the wages of everyone in the firm – from the chief executive to the newest recruit.
Read more: Why we're embracing radical transparency to tackle inequalities at PwC
This kind of openness is very challenging to implement, and it’s definitely not for everyone, but adopting a radically transparent approach can lead to significant benefits.
Build trust
When conversations are open and honest – and the data informing them is available to everyone – and when an organisation demonstrates faith in its employees by giving them autonomy, staff feel trusted. People who feel trusted are likely to return that trust.
Cut red tape
Transparency reduces bureaucracy. If you’re open with your company’s internal information, and about what everyone’s doing and how much money they’re spending – and earning – you’ll need fewer rules and policies.
Encourage innovation
Nothing stifles fresh thinking like a complex bureaucracy. If people are busy negotiating endless policies and procedures, and worrying about complying with myriad rules, you can be sure that they won’t be innovating. And innovation is arguably the top priority for any modern company.
Create a meritocracy
Transparency means dispensing with traditional top-down performance management, and adopting the approach we use at Good Rebels: bottom-up and peer-to-peer feedback from the people you work with every day. That way, there’s no favouritism – just honest, open appraisals that motivate people to try harder and get better.
Foster gender equality
In an open meritocracy, there’s no room for discrepancy between what women are paid compared to men for doing the same job. How could anyone possibly justify such a thing?
But first, the groundwork
If all this sounds tempting, I would advise you not to jump in just yet. You can’t just share everyone’s salary information without doing some extensive work on your company culture first. At Good Rebels, we started this process in 2012, and we still haven’t finished.
We had to do many years’ work on building a culture of trust and transparency before we felt ready to open up about salaries. Even then, it took a couple of years to work through legal issues – such as changing everyone’s contracts, and gaining their formal consent to publish the data.
For big companies with multiple legacy salary bands, transparency might never be appropriate without some radical re-engineering. Pay in firms like that tends to be unbalanced due to all sorts of long-forgotten factors, so if you start to openly share that information then you’re likely to create more problems than you solve.
But for startups, or any company small enough and brave enough to remould their culture and their practices for the greater good, numerous potential benefits lie in wait.
We’re a very long way away from radical transparency becoming the norm – in fact, that might never happen – but there’s no question that it’s a growing trend. Millennials will not put up with employers who insist on remaining opaque; sooner or later, they will vote with their feet and force change.