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Google Staffers Share Salary Info With Each Other; Management Freaks
Nerval's Lobster writes: Imagine a couple of employees at your company create a spreadsheet that lists their salaries. They place the spreadsheet on an internal network, where other employees soon add their own financial information. Within a day, the project has caught on like wildfire, with people not only listing their salaries but also their bonuses and other compensation-related info. While that might sound a little far-fetched, that's exactly the scenario that recently played out at Google, according to an employee, Erica Baker, who detailed the whole incident on Twitter. While management frowned upon employees sharing salary data, she wrote, "the world didn't end everything didn't go up in flames because salaries got shared." For years, employees and employers have debated the merits (and drawbacks) of revealing salaries. While most workplaces keep employee pay a tightly guarded secret, others have begun fiddling with varying degrees of transparency, taking inspiration from studies that have shown a higher degree of salary-related openness translates into happier workers. (Other studies (PDF) haven't suggested the same effect.) Baker claims the spreadsheet compelled more Google employees to ask and receive "equitable pay based on data in the sheet."
Easy. Ask the employees what they've done to make them think they deserve it. If Steve, Alan, and Lucy all make 50 grand a year, and I make 45 grand, and my contributions to the company are comparable to theirs, why shouldn't I be paid similarly? If I'm not coming through in crucial times, or in ways that the others are, I would like to know about it. I would hope that a manager would be aware of the value of his/her employees. I know, it's a stretch.
Ever see GlassDoor? Seems like a great idea.
Management didn't "freak". The spreadsheet in question is alive and well, and Google employees continue adding their information to it (I did). If management really wanted gone, it would be taken down. Erica Baker's manager wasn't happy about it, and she was invited to talk to her manager about it. It may or may not have bothered someone above her manager; Erica doesn't know and neither do we.
Her manager also chose to interpret the peer bonus rules such that the bonuses peers sent her forward weren't given to her. That's at least partly correct on her manager's part. The peer bonus rules say that any given action/effort can only be rewarded once. If the manager feels that it was a really valuable contribution the manager can choose to discard the peer bonus ($125) and instead award a larger spot bonus (amount variable), but only one peer bonus per act.
What is a little bit weird was that Erica said peer bonuses were rejected before one was approved, so the rejections before the approval weren't due to the one PB per action rule. Also weird is that Erica said her colleague got multiple bonuses for the spreadsheet. That shouldn't normally happen.
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It seems logical to me.
Money sum is relative, buying power is what matters. If you earn $1000, but a can of coke costs $20 it's worse than you earning $100 but the can of coke selling for $1.
If everyone earns a lot, then the prices in that area are most likely higher too. On theother hand, if everybody earns less, then the prices are most likely lower.
This was the case in my country, Lithuania before the Euro - the average salary was low compared to other EU countries, but prices of food and services was also lower. Obviously imported goods were justas expensive as elsewhee. Now 6 months after we switched to the Euro, prices jumped (in some cases by a factor of 2 or somebody just wrote EUR instead of LTL after the number incresing the price by a factor of 3.45), but salaries remained the same. Now we have an interesting combination - almost Russian salaries and almost European prices.