I invariably enjoy the Birkbeck Business Week because it
brings me up to date with the latest research interests of the school and fires
up the Quattro grey cells.
This year was no exception – there were sessions on the
impact of induction on employee identity and a session on the current darling
of the consulting world, employee engagement.
Being the critical sort – Birkbeck had taught me well! – I was pleased
to see Teaching Fellow Richard Williams was as healthily sceptical as I was.
But one of the most interesting session for me was Julie
Dickinson’s presentation of project work on pay secrecy.
Academic research here is scarce – well, it is secret – and Julie gave some of
assumptions about the potential pros and cons of keeping pay under wraps.
It doesn’t seem to be a uniform phenomenon; the well paid
would rather keep their payslips close to their chests; the less well-paid
appear to talk more openly about it – possibly to complain?
The research – such as it is – is not only contradictory but
also fairly difficult to compare.
Studies look at perceptions and employee outcomes from pay secrecy, but
they look at slightly different variables.
And therefore reach different conclusions.
A lively discussion pondered whether pay secrecy isn’t more
about the inability of organisations to properly define the value produced by
different jobs than it is about a need to keep compensation private – although
obviously privacy does come into it.
Some people thought that openness about pay may lead to “poaching” key
staff – although a recruiter in the audience said that it was rare that she saw
people being overpaid against the market average when pay secrecy was written
into their contracts.
A key point about pay secrecy was the opportunity it gives for
increasing pay inequality by the back door. There was a lot of discussion about
the transparency supposedly inherent in the public sector (every senior civil
servant had their salary published in bands, someone pointed out) and lacking
in the private sector.
My own view was that inequality in pay seems to be in place
regardless of how transparent pay is – there are plenty of women in the public
sector who are paid less for doing more work than their male colleagues….
An interesting discussion, even without the solid empirical
evidence. Perhaps because of it!