what are the ethics around asking an employee not to talk about her raise? — Ask a Manager
I have an employee, we’ll call her Mariah, who worked at our company in a different department for over a year before she applied for an opening in my department. She was stellar in her original role, so I was thrilled to take her.
When the transfer was final and she showed up on my payroll, I was shocked to see that her pay rate was more than almost every single one of my 12 staff, all of whom had 5-9 years more experience and significantly more responsibilities. Her original role was entry-level, and my department does higher level work so I was really surprised and upset to see the pay disparity between the departments. I reached out to Mariah’s old manager and was told that Mariah was so great that at some point she had an offer elsewhere, and my company was willing to fight for her and offered her the top of that department’s pay scale for her to stay, and she did. Turns out, my department’s payscale was very similar despite the difference in the job descriptions.
Upon transfer, Mariah immediately told everyone in my department her pay rate which understandably caused CHAOS. I had already started arguing for an updated payscale for my department before I found out Mariah had spilled the beans and then I tried to expedite it as much as possible. The news of Mariah’s rate caused her to be very unpopular with the rest of the team. They should have been mad at me or my grandboss or the owners, not Mariah, but that’s not how that tends to work. It was peak drama for a while.
