A while back, I encouraged everyone who would listen not to drink the entire pitcher of Kool-Aid regarding pay transparency.  My main point in that Workforce article?  While it's trendy and seems progressive to call for full transparency in pay rates and pay practices in organizations, the folks who are calling for it don't have to live with the employee fallout. 

In my experience, employees generally don't want their co-workers to have exact or directional information regarding what they are making.

Ann Bares at Compensation Force threw up a post that has the best quantitative data supporting my view:

"How willing are we to share pay information with family and friends?  How nosy are we about the pay of our colleagues?  How comfortable are we asking for a pay raise?  An interesting study released earlier this year by Ceridian sheds some light here.

A few highlights:

We are reluctant to share our own salary details.  89% of respondents say they are reluctant to share salary information with colleagues, 85% say the same thing about their friends.  No real surprise here.  Interestingly though, I thought, 53% are reluctant to share these details with family.  Depending on how (or whether, and this isn't clear to me) the survey defines "family", this could be shocking ... or not.  Sharing pay details with at least one's spouse or partner would seem to be a necessary precursor to any kind of budgeting or planning of personal finances.  Beyond that (in-laws, etc.), I'd be inclined to agree with most (88%) of survey respondents who claim "it is nobody else's business".

Nearly half of us, however, are interested in our colleagues' salary details.  While generally unwilling to discuss our personal salary information, many of us (46%) are nonetheless interested in learning what the guy/gal in the next cubicle or office makes.  No real surprise here, chalk it up to human nature.  What I did find noteworthy, though, is the strong relationship with age in these findings.  The younger we are, the more interested we are in our colleague's pay, as detailed below.  To me, this is strong evidence for the importance of pay system transparency to younger workers.

• 18-24 year olds: 73% are interested in seeing their colleagues' salary details

• 25-34 year olds: 70% are interested in seeing their colleagues' salary details

• 35-44 year olds: 43% are interested in seeing their colleagues' salary details

• 45-54 year olds: 39% are interested in seeing their colleagues' salary details

• 55+ year olds: 29% are interested in seeing their colleagues' salary details

In other words, we want to know what other people make, but don't want anyone else to have the same data on us.  What's that mean?  Full pay transparency is still going to cause more problems than it solves.

Before you attack me in the comments, just know that conceptually I like the idea of pay transparency from an intellectual point of view.  Sadly, I've got too many years in the business and know all the employee relations issues that transparency would cause.  Until the 89% figure goes WAAAAY down, transparency isn't supported by the general employee population.