While sure, every small business needs to have smart financial habits, at the same time, though, you shouldn’t underpay and penny-pinch when it comes to your team. And there’s just this weird feeling, this awkwardness in general. Like, you can usually feel it before anyone says it out loud. Someone finds out a new hire is making more. A job listing goes up with a salary range that’s higher than what current employees are earning (yes, they can see this, and no, they’re not stupid).
Maybe even a coworker mentions their pay by accident, then everyone gets a little too quiet because the number doesn’t match what people assumed. And from that point on, work feels different. Like, really different too. And sure, you might still answer emails the same way.
You might still join the meeting, finish the project, help the new person, and act normal because, well, bills still exist. Again, theres this awkward feeling, and resentment too.
Being Told Not to Talk About Pay Feels Strange
Most people aren’t trying to turn salary into office gossip. They’re trying to understand if they’re being paid fairly. That’s a reasonable thing to care about, especially when work takes up so much time, energy, and, let’s be honest, patience. There was even an episode of The Office about salary too; it’s totally normal stuff. So when a workplace treats pay like a forbidden subject, it can make employees more suspicious, not less. Again, they’re not stupid; they know something is up.
Avoiding Money Conversations Doesn’t Protect Trust
And how could it? Again, staff will only get suspicious, and it can eventually get to the point where they leave. Actually, Alex Kleyner has spoken about how silence around money can affect long-term outcomes, and salary secrecy is a pretty clear example of that. So, just avoiding the conversation doesn’t make employees forget about pay. It just makes them talk about it somewhere else, usually without context and usually with more frustration.
Remember, Unclear Raises Make People Guess
A raise shouldn’t feel like reading tea leaves. If you’re taking on more work, staying late, training people, handling difficult clients, or keeping things moving when the team is stretched, it’s fair to want to know what that means financially. If you’re a business owner and you see staff do that, well, yeah, obviously they deserve more than a pat on the back.
They’re basically making you richer; they’re working hard for you- shouldn’t they deserve compensation for that? Maybe a raise? Maybe a promotion? Well, something?
New Hires Will Absolutely Expose Old Problems Too
There’s nothing automatically wrong with a new hire earning a competitive salary. Besides, you should keep in mind here that market rates change, hiring gets harder, and companies sometimes have to pay more to bring people in. Now, that technically isn’t the problem here.
Instead, the problem starts when current employees have been sitting at old rates with no review, no explanation, and plenty of praise about loyalty. You can tell someone they’re valued all day long, but if the numbers don’t back that up, the message doesn’t really land, right?
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