Early this year, an engagement and content leader at a web hosting company shared a spreadsheet on social mediaOpens a new window that she had been filling with data.
The information had been gathered by friends and colleagues in the same field, and it was simple and anonymized: a spreadsheet with basic information about job title, location and annual salary. It had a field where participants could put in additional information about extra benefits or other job perks.
Unlike other available information, it reflected the salaries of women and was aimed at increasing pay transparency for the sake of equity in tech. This has become a relatively popular approachOpens a new window lately, with professionals in other fields also sharing their salary information so that remuneration more fairly reflects responsibility.
In many fields, sharing salaries has become all the rage.
The women-in-tech salary spreadsheet had a few shortcomings that similar spreadsheets have addressed by including more fields, including length of time in the industry or descriptions of specific job duties. There are many ways that the spreadsheet creators could have added more information to include some of the nuance of salary decisions.
But that’s one of the more general problems with these kinds of spreadsheets. As many HR professionals know, salary calculations aren’t made based simply on location or even years of experience. Among other aspects, there’s the critical track record of a given candidate — the quantifiable and proven value that they can bring to their employers, either in how they creatively approach problem-solving or strive for overlooked efficiency gains.
So, is there any value in these kinds of salary spreadsheets? Absolutely.
Professionals should feel empowered to negotiate their salaries and packagesOpens a new window , especially if they sense they’re not being remunerated fairly. But there are also some important points to keep in mind about the perils of such information.
Where’s the equity?
The women-in-tech spreadsheet offers some interesting information but if the goal is to tackle the pervasive problem of gender-based income disparitiesOpens a new window , it would be a more useful resource with salaries from men in comparable roles. Fortunately, HR professionals have this information at hand, so it should be possible to run a program or produce a report that analyzes potential gender-based differences.
It creates an opportunity for a broader conversation at the company about whether there’s a problem and what’s being done to fix it. By presenting this kind of data, anonymized of course, you can have a direct conversation with employees about fair pay.
Pay differences
The rise of salary spreadsheets are also an opportunity to start a conversation within the company about why some pay differences might exist. There’s no need to be punitive or create a dispiriting message but explaining some of the factors that HR looks at in determining remuneration packages will help people understand why sometimes salaries aren’t only about years of experience.
Maintaining discretion
If there’s a company policy against sharing salary information among colleagues, it may be the case that some people view the policy as unfair or against the goals of fairness. As part of the conversation about how HR determines pay differences, it makes sense to feature a short explanation of why these policies exist, including the need to maintain professional collegiality.
The best way to make this message understood, though, is if everyone at the company has a clear sense of HR’s commitment to addressing gender-based pay differences. Hence, the importance of  transparency about your programs to create a fair workplace.