How would this affect productivity in your organisation or in any company in an Kenyan perspective.

Article by Happy trainers

"At Happy what everybody earns is public within the company. Every member of staff has access to a spread-sheet, which gives not only the current salary but every salary that each person has earned since they first joined the company. And, yes, that does include my salary.
Many people find that surprising and assume that, however open your organisation is, salaries are one thing that must be kept secret. Why is that?
I was asked to talk about our open salaries policy on a radio programme on BBC Radio 4. As I talked to the Producer before the programme she recounted her own experience. She had found that a colleague, doing the same job, earned £10,000 more than she did. She confronted her boss and asked why the difference. “Because he asked for it and you didn’t” came the surprisingly honest answer.
When salaries are secret it is easy for rises to be based on arbitrary factors such as whether somebody asked or not. Or because somebody works later at the office, whether or not they are more productive as a result. When salaries are open there is the simple check that everybody can see the results and challenge them. It certainly focuses the mind when you are awarding a pay increase.
And even if salaries are fair, people will often assume they are not if they are secret. They will assume that people have got rises because they stay late (even if they don’t produce any more), go down the pub with their manager or are simply somebody’s favourites. This is not good for morale and sadly, without transparency, those rumours are often true.
I can’t claim that everybody at Happy is satisfied with the salary they earn. But the one element that is uncontroversial is the open salaries policy. In our most recent survey 85% said they approved of it and the majority said it helped them to understand what they could earn in the future.
In some countries this is not controversial at all. When I spoke in Norway, the idea of open salaries did not get a reaction. The reason was simple: In Norway what everybody earns is publicly available. On the internet, you can look up the tax returns for anybody you like, from your next door neighbour to the
Prime Minister.

Making Salaries Open
One thing I find interesting about the concept of open salaries is that people normally at first assume the concept is impossible, but – when they consider it – find it makes sense.
At the Financial Times Best Workplaces Awards in Berlin in 2006 I met Stelios Stavrides from Piscines Ideales, a Greek swimming pool company, who had come in the top 10 best workplaces in Europe. We were discussing transparency and he commented that everything in his company was open. “Except salaries, of course”. I love to rise to a challenge like that and, as with most people, he found it hard to find a reason why they had to be secret.
At the same event two years later I met his son, who was also involved in running the business. I asked him if his father had mentioned anything about our conversation. “Oh, that came from you did it?” he 1.6 beta The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart responded. “Well last year we published the salaries for our senior management. That went well, so this year we published them for all our staff. We haven’t looked back.”
In 2009 Piscines Ideales was rated the best workplace in Europe among small and medium sized
businesses. I can’t claim that moving to transparent salaries were the reason but it can’t have done any harm.
When asked why they need to keep salaries secret, a surprising number of people respond “because they are not fair”. If this is true of your organisation, my challenge would be: Could you set a date in the future when you will make salaries open, and use that as a target for making your salaries fair?"