I'd like to get push-back to the idea of everyone earning the same salary. Why wouldn't it work from some people who seem to have some experience like you have?
Imagine that there is a distribution of valuable output from employees. That not every employee contributes an equal amount to the bottom line, when you measure everything that you can possibly think of, every externality and intangible.
If you believe that there are those differences, that you can judge those correctly (but elect to not act on it), and that other employers can also judge that well enough to offer differentiated higher salaries to the most valuable employees, then you will be left holding an adversely selected set of employees. (Other employers will cream off the most valuable by being able to offer higher compensation, and you will see more of the left side of the distribution applying to your company once it becomes known that "everyone is paid the same".)
Not in every case (maybe a high-value-creating individual believes in your company and mission enough to forgo a higher salary they could command elsewhere), but in aggregate, I believe you signal to the highest performers that they should look elsewhere and your lowest performers should stay, because you are more interested in equality than fairness.
Mediocrity can be mitigated by making expectations clear for advancing to the next level in the organization, and the compensation increase one gets.
For example, master these 5 skills at level I, and we then meet to set up a process for learning the next 5 skills needed to advance to level II. Once you advance, you get +20% salary.
I think that seems like a good way of incentivizing performance and continued learning.
and then you have no way to compensate someone who has a 6th, incredibly valuable skill, but not the other 5 you wanted.
Or you can start doing super complicated things like "have 5 out of those 10 skills", but are they as valuable?
Yeah, that's a pain. And then another company may value the skill differently, and you then have to just lose your employee to them because they'll pay them more but you won't because of your rigid structure.
There's so many variables, uniformity here won't get you the best teams.
If a company has removed its own ability to reward me for putting in extra effort, busting my ass to produce extra value would make me kind of a sucker, don't you think?
Every scheme I've heard of to get around that has had had some major flaw or other. Usually by failing to capture some important area of endeavour; or by relying on some combination of easily gamed metrics (like tickets closed or evaluations by co-workers); or requiring employees to capture excruciatingly detailed metrics; or by having incentives too small to be worth pursuing; or by including a large management fudge factor that makes the rest of the system pointless.
The situation for salarymen of the same year in big corps. at Japan is kind of similar. Wages are only from tenure, so two people who have been at the a corp. for 10 years have the same salary, even if one's a total duffer and the other is super important for the company. The reasons for this are historical, but don't really matter to this discussion. Almost everyone at these big co.s are hired right out of college in yearly "classes" and then stay their until retirement (ideally, obviously things are more complicated). The system isn't as strong today, so I'm describing something that existed more in the '80s.
What end's up happening is people in the same year are sorted by many other things. Better more interesting tasks are given to higher status workers, they avoid more grunt work, get nice perks (at top levels, things like a company car, etc.), and more respect.
It's hard to separate the effects of this on the company from all the other things Japanese companies do which are different from USA/Europe. But you might look into that.
Shipping, delivery of a product/useful labor, is my definition of value far more than experience. If you're a nobody but I can trust you to Get Shit Done (tm), you are more valuable to me than a greater number of "Steve Jobs" who I can't rely on as much. As such, the last thing I want to do is remove a hugely meaningful incentive someone has to push hard and differentiate themselves.
Now this certainly has moral pitfalls, if you use it as a carrot to get people to keep upping the ante on each other, but at some point we have to trust the autonomy of our workers to be able to say no. (I believe that management can help with this as well concurrent with keeping salary-based differentiation, by things such as enforcing not working outside of work hours, mandated vacation time, salary transparency and clear metrics for what achieving more/success means, etc)
Do you mean everyone in the same role, or everyone in the company? I guess you could argue that everyone contributes equally in their own way, but it sounds like it would be hard to deal with market rates. For example, if the market rate for a support agent is $30k and the market rate for a developer is $70k what do you do?
That's still not a reason to be secretive. In fact it was cited by the article as one of the great positives of salary openness: you got much more accurate feedback much more quickly which made it easier to make those tricker decisions.
