What can I say? by Alan Measures, Moog

One of my very first tasks in an HR role was to ring round a list of contacts in competitor companies and ask them what they would pay for a particular kind of job. I was dumb struck. Surely this kind of thing was secret? It turned out that it sort of was. But sort of wasn’t. This was an era before laws around anti-trust forbade such practices, and I came to see the logic in obtaining data from reliable sources rather than relying on what someone had been told by his buddy in the pub. In an era before laptops, HR databases and e-mail, such sensitive information was shared very carefully. And despite working in Compensation, when I was given my monthly (mainframe generated) computer print out listing all the employees in the company and their pay, there was a gap where the HR data had been. One of my boss’s key competencies was to wield a sharp pair of scissors.

These days, I could just tweet my request for data. Assuming I could get my request down to 140 characters or less. And that the replies from my 16 followers would for a representative sample. I could always turn to Facebook and LinkedIn for additional support.

These seem to be times of increasing dichotomy around reward information. In the last week I’ve simultaneously received guides on how I could maintain a contractual clause that forbids an employee from disclosing their pay to a colleague – a compensation super injunction if you will -   alongside details of how the “Say on Pay” elements of the USA’s Dodd-Frank legislation is forcing new levels of executive pay disclosure. Although many Executive Boards hoped to fall in line with the legislations requirement for disclosure once every three years, shareholders have pushed back and mandated annual disclosure instead.

So just how different would an employee tweeting details of their salary raise be from the more traditional chat with friends down the pub? A tweet might reach 50 followers rather than 5 fellow drinkers, but the degree to which either group would either take any notice or believe what is said is probably pretty similar. What differs is their durability; while pub conversations rarely have any resonance beyond closing time, tweets and posts are digitally recorded, and can easily be harvested by data aggregators. Databases of pay rates culled from user generated content are already up and running but are hobbled by a lack of objectivity. But maybe a Wikipaydia isn’t that far away. I might just go and check and see if the domain name is still free.