Salary & Co-Workers: Should you tell them how much you make?
by, Amena Hussain
The new salary sharing site, glassdoor.com, allows users to read about other people’s salaries as long as they enter their own salary for other users to view. In its first two months glassdoor has published more than 50,000 company reviews and salary reports from 80 countries. The site’s co-founder and chief executive Robert Hohman theorizes that “People don’t talk enough about how they can be more valuable. This should help them. Knowledge is power.” But is that really true?
After every internal review, mid-year and annual, the question comes up: should you share your salary increase 
(or lack of) with your co-workers? The review-er will tell you not to disclose the details of your review because they do not want to deal with griping amongst the employees (however, employee rights in the workplace allow you to share your own salary information if you wish). But a lot of times we, the review-ed employees, think: hey, that person is my friend, and it’s okay if I tell them how my review went. These situations beg the question: to tell or not to tell?
Think about it: HR, the people charged with running the show, must have something right. Making salaries or salary increases public information breeds inner-office resentment. Finding out that your co-worker makes more than you when he/she does the same or less work that you do will create havoc in the workplace. Your motivation to do more work or excel at your job will decrease, and your attitude towards your co-workers will change as well.
According to a British study, about 89% of employees say that they don’t want to share pay details. Similarly, most employers stress that they do not want employees sharing payroll information with each other either. “The problem with these discussions is that there’s often a winner and a loser,” says Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation at Salary.com, a pay comparison Web site. “Someone’s feelings are likely to get hurt.”
Salary information discussions can be a touchier subject than politics or religion.
It comes to realizing the downside of sharing salary information, and making an informed – not emotional – decision on whether or not to share. If you don’t want to create an underlying tension between yourself and a co-worker, tread carefully around this topic.
