When it comes to the money we earn, we’re all fairly coy, though the government is heaping pressure on certain sections of the public sector to be a bit more open about what they earn. In fact, it’s more than that – because very soon, anyone in the public sector earning over £58,000 per year, will be on a published government list.
Which I’m sure they are all thrilled about…
While this moves along the line of openness and honesty, two crucial elements to effective organisational development, this did get me thinking about the impact that certain revelations can have within organisations.
One leadership development programme that we run, Purposeful Teams, delves into the inner-operations of teams, challenging members of that team and ensuring that by the end of it everyone is on the same page. We’ve implemented it across the world and had some pretty fantastic results, driving up communication levels, motivation, production and profits. Having a team together, isolated from the business and the day-to-day tasks, just focussed on themselves and how they operate, is very powerful.
It is challenging of course, but it is an opportunity to share, make sense of the tasks at hand, communicate and connect in a way that very often the team has will never have done in the past.
That’s one thing, but salary revelations are another. As humans would we naturally feel aggrieved if we found out that other team members, supposedly on the same ‘level’ within the organisation, were taking home a higher reward package for the same level of work? Quite possibly.
Do you think there’s a limit to how much colleagues should reveal to one another? Could this culture of forcing openness upon employees actually be detrimental to teamwork?
James Pentreath
