I worked for a trading firm that had public pay & it certainly wasn’t about equality. It was simply recognition that people will talk about pay and it was easier to get in front of any ill will & miscommunication.
There were extremely wide pay bands there for the same function and it worked fine because the company was perfectly happy to tell people “that other person is paid more because they are worth more to us”. I find that a whole lot more palatable to the nonsense pay bands I see at the regular tech company.
Don’t lie to people about why your pay is secret (it’s always for information asymmetry in negotiations) and be honest to your employees about their value to the company and everything seems to sort itself out.
>"it’s always for information asymmetry in negotiations"
There are other reasons; depending on how varied the roles and responsibilities are in an organization, and the people working there (partly 'culture'), this kind of information can make some people get embarrassed or envious. This is obviously most true for company with wider ranges of operations (highly paid engineers vs. lower paid manufacturing workers and/or customer service personnel,) in areas where 'value to company' is not a widely-shared outlook.
There were extremely wide pay bands there for the same function and it worked fine because the company was perfectly happy to tell people “that other person is paid more because they are worth more to us”. I find that a whole lot more palatable to the nonsense pay bands I see at the regular tech company.
Don’t lie to people about why your pay is secret (it’s always for information asymmetry in negotiations) and be honest to your employees about their value to the company and everything seems to sort itself out.