Ethics of managers obtaining pay info for not their reports

May 4, 2022 10:21 AM

Is it ethical for a manager to obtain salary information of an employee that they don't manage?

Specific: I'm Director of department A, I have a direct report E. I had a meeting yesterday with the Director of department B in which B said "I don't know why we're paying $X to E if all E ever does is" and followed it up with a gross misunderstanding of E's role*. E reported to B until about a year ago; when E was transferred to my department, E got a raise after about 6 months. So it's looking like A recently found out what E is currently making. This bothers me, but is it ethical? Assume that neither department is Finance, B and I are peers, we both report to the CEO, E has not divulged their compensation. What you think?

*I'm not happy about this but I can live with it. The real issue is I already don't trust B and this seems like a slimy thing.

posted by disconnect to Work & Money (16 answers total)

I work for the government, so everyone in the whole country knows approximately what I make, which maybe colours my perception on this issue, but I don't think salary information should be shielded from others at the Director level. Shouldn't one Director be able to know what other Directors are paying their people to ensure the first Director is paying her own people competitively and not missing out on raises she could be getting for them?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:24 AM on May 4, 2022 [20 favorites]

I think if A did go snooping into E's business due to some kind of grudge or dislike, that's definitely not ethical. And it sounds unlikely that they could have had some higher purpose in mind. They also could have found out if someone else told them, which would be gossiping & also not ethical.
posted by bleep at 10:36 AM on May 4, 2022

IMO, secrecy around compensation serves the interests of managers not employees (and especially not underpaid groups such as women and BIPOC). If your company shares this view then people knowing what other people earn is one of the consequences of that. If B did not have to bend the rules to find this information out, i.e. they just looked it up somewhere in a database to which they are specifically given access then no, it's not necessarily unethical in my opinion. It sounds like the way the did it lacked emotional intelligence.

If, on the other hand, you work somewhere with no culture of transparency around compensation, then yes, what B did, especially given their apparent reasons (to disparage someone), was probably "unethical" for your company's definition of ethical. I would repeat, though, that I think that approach to compensation transparency has negative consequences for many of your employees. So if you're inclined to complain about this, I would urge you to do so in a way that does not further reduce transparency.
posted by caek at 10:37 AM on May 4, 2022 [18 favorites]

Setting the ethics of their awareness of the info aside for a moment, it's unprofessional to make that kind of comment in general, even moreso if it's unprompted and undeserved. At this level, you should have the emotional intelligence to know better than to trash an employee like that. If you reframe this and imagine an HR person who would definitely have a reason to know saying something like this, it's obviously unprofessional and they would definitely know better.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:37 AM on May 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

"Ethical" is only a word that matters if the manager got the salary info via some means of subterfuge: read an open file on someone's desk/machine, gained access to someone's login, took advantage of being the wrong name on a email, etc. If they weren't meant to have the data and they gained access to it anyway without permission, that would be unethical.

But everything else falls under company policy and the discretion of leadership.

The behavior--making a shitty little comment like they did about your employee--is entirely unrelated to the salary knowledge question and should be dealt with by a higher up manager as an employee relations issue. Shitty behavior is shitty behavior, whether they're allowed to see pay data or not.
posted by phunniemee at 10:41 AM on May 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

It’s a slap at you too, since it implies that since E is no longer under him but reports to you, E's salary has ballooned and E is no longer worth it.

So ethically questionable and passive aggressive.
posted by jamjam at 11:01 AM on May 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

I don’t think it’s ethical of companies to hide the information in the first place, so to me it’s definitely no-harm-no-foul for people to get their hands on it.

B is clearly being a prick with the information but something tells me that B would manage to be a prick no matter what the circumstances.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:17 AM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

+1 for salary info should be public

+1 for B is a dick

The two parts are not really related though
posted by rd45 at 11:22 AM on May 4, 2022 [10 favorites]

I share others' belief that compensation should be open information, but I don't think it follows that in a setting where compensation isn't public, any means of accessing this information about anyone is inherently ethical. This question is an example of someone with power trying to leverage their own special access to information, which is exactly the type of thing that salary transparency aims to counter.
posted by dusty potato at 11:31 AM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is your company proactive in ensuring that pay ranges are competitive and that people are getting raises on a regular basis? If not, how does your team make sure pay is equitable across the company? As people who manage others, I think you should have an idea of what people at their level make in your company, even if they are not your direct report.

B having wrong ideas about someone's duties is the issue here, not them knowing someone's salary.
posted by soelo at 11:54 AM on May 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Absent some backstory where B really wants to get E fired or E has been talking badly about B (including saying things like "wow, it's great to report to soelo compared to that jerk B") this is an attack on you, not E.

It implies that you're a bad manager since you overpay your employees and/or don't assign them work properly and/or don't really know what they're doing. If I were your common manager (the CEO in this case) and this was said in front of me I would read it as an intended negative comment about you, since it's not like I'm going to do anything personally about E - that's your job, and B is saying you aren't doing it.
posted by true at 12:02 PM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Obtaining salary info is not really the problem here, IMO, but the way it's been used and the politics that appear to be at work.

Is it ethical for a manager to obtain salary info of an employee they don't manage? I think the answer to that is largely yes if there's a legitimate reason to know. For instance, two people may be doing the same job in different departments and getting paid wildly different salaries. If a manager is using that salary info to argue "hey, my team makes 70% of what Bob's team makes doing the same jobs but in different parts of the company." Yeah, that's ethical.

Seeing how other managers compensate people, seeing their budgets and what they're given to compensate people, is important.

This, though. This sounds personal. E moved departments, got a raise, and it sounds very much like B is trying to reach across the organization to cause trouble for E now that they're in a new department.

Is it ethical that they got the salary info? Doesn't matter. It's not the problem. Would you mind if they knew but had said "hey! I saw you gave E a big raise after they came over. I'm so happy, I hadn't had budget to do that, but they totally deserve it"?

If the answer is "no," then it's not obtaining info that bothers you - it's how they're using what they have.

At the risk of going farther than the question at hand... it sounds like either they have an axe to grind with you, E, or both, and / or there's a larger conversation about needs not being met. Is E supposed to be providing B with something that E isn't getting? Did this come up in context of budgets and they're pissed you were able to give E money and they haven't been able to give raises? Something else?

Sounds like politics at play, and you should drill into the real issue here. If you both report to the CEO and don't trust each other, that's bad and needs to be addressed for the sake of your teams... but "they unethically know my employee's salary" isn't the silver bullet here.
posted by jzb at 12:07 PM on May 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

This feels unanswerable to me without knowing your workplace's policies about who can access salary information. Did this person somehow circumvent existing privacy protections in contradiction of workplace rules to get this information? Or is it expected that they have access to everyone's salary and look it up at will? Or is it sort of tacitly known but not recorded anywhere that although they have it, they shouldn't use it? Those are all different scenarios.

If this person would have had to specifically break a company rule/policy to get information about your employee you could take that up with your manager. I think E should know this was done, in that case where she has an expectation of privacy that was breached, and you could give your manager a heads-up for any guidance about how to have that conversation.

Otherwise I think you're focusing on the wrong thing and should focus on how this person used the information (rudely and to undermine another staff member), not how they got it.

I do agree that in the bigger picture no one's salaries should be secret, but if that were your workplace situation, I assume you wouldn't be asking the question.
posted by Stacey at 1:46 PM on May 4, 2022

Managers often see budget details, so may see salaries. I suspect B's salary is low, and B is pissed and insecure.
posted by theora55 at 2:30 PM on May 4, 2022

It's perfectly fine for another manager to know what your team is being paid and there are plenty of good reasons for them knowing this. It's not fine that they are using that information to criticise you as a manager and imply that you are overpaying someone (I don't see this behaviour as criticising E, but criticising you). I imagine, as a good manager, you set them straight about why B is getting paid what they are and that should be the end of the issue.
posted by dg at 5:51 PM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

In principle, I agree that there should be complete transparency all round wrt compensation.

However, I strongly disagree that managers unrelated to you should know your compensation details UNLESS you, as a pleb, also have total access to the compensation details of everyone else in the company, including CEO. Asymmetric knowledge is class warfare, in this case on a miniscule scale.

Of course estimates of compensation can be gleaned by knowing budgets etc. But firm knowledge of anybody's compensation should be known only to those people who are involved on determining it, as a necessary evil. No, other managers don't NEED to know it to determine the compensatation for their own reports - just compensate them fairly, which is not so hard to figure out. Fair compensation is clearly not what B is after, though, since they could as easily have said 'Wow, Es salary is x, let me go increase my own reports' salary!'

So, morally, IMHO it's either complete transparency for everybody or complete secrecy all round. Exceptions are the situations in which the salary-makers themselves want to disclose and discuss.

The legal situation might be different in your country/ for your company, but IMHO morally B is making a dominance play both towards yourself and E.
posted by doggod at 5:05 AM on May 5, 2022