Are organisations with transparent pay policies more successful than those that are not? Tricky question. Because everyone will have a clue that that relationship can never be established with complete precision. Simply and simply because success depends on so many other factors, that openness or not can never be the decisive factor.

Therefore, shouldn't the question read differently? For example: How wise is it to keep salary differences between employees secret? Or: Does blood flow when we know each other's income? Or even more to the point: are we doing each other a favour if we know who earns what? Jan gets this, Pete that and Klaas just a bit more.

To ask the question is to answer it. In this case, by researcher David Burkus who finds that organisations listed as modern make their remuneration policies fully transparent. And the reason? This is how they save money. A lot of money according to Burkus. Those savings come mainly from salary negotiations, because employees permanently walk around with the (delusional) perception that they are underpaid.

What Burkus says here is not new. Research has long shown that those who do not know their closest colleague's salary are convinced that it is higher than their own. Add this to the fact that three quarters of staff are also convinced they do better work than the rest and the constant need for more salary is there. As a boss, keep that in check.

But the answer to the question of whether we should know each other's salary could be a bit more principled, as far as I am concerned. Because of our need for distributive justice we want to know how the valuation of our contribution compares with that of others. We want to know each other's added value. Not so much the salary!

Knowing exactly what each colleague earns is not at all necessary for a transparent remuneration policy. Full disclosure consists, as far as I am concerned, of a positive answer to the following questions.

1. Do I know the criteria by which my qualities are valued and does the outcome match the image I have of myself? 
2. Can I give my career a purpose: what is my perspective in relation to my talent?
3. Do I know and understand how my colleagues are valued? 

If you can talk about this with those on whose judgement your salary depends, transparency has achieved its goal: equitable distribution of the wage bill.

Such transparency must then be counterbalanced by that everyone's salary, that comes with its added value, also accepts it. Then we are there, aren't we?