Confidentiality Regarding Salary / Perks

Hello All,
Confidentiality of Salary particulars is good for Organization or not.
My company is strictly following the rules regarding confidentiality regarding Salary / perks, even we are issuing warning letters and termination letter for the same.
Please put your views on this and what kind of impact it will create on employees point of view.
Thanking you,
Regards,
Ashsih

Hi Ashsih,
Confidentiality is required but not a level a company will terrorize the employee to issue warning letter or termination letter.
Its but a human instinct to know how much others are earning and its not crime, if I want to tell the whole world what I am earning. Nobody on this earth except me can stop me doing from this.
I know few companies adopt this unrealistic strategy so they can make their employee hide their salaries to avoid competition and fear of losing employees and anxiety within company. And guess what such practices are mostly in companies who do not have any specific laid down appraisal system or have system that lacks in certain areas.
Such a tactics by companies to terrorize employees on disclosing their salary has not benefited and will not benefit them. Rather spending time on this, company should spend time on how to award and retain the best talent.
Ukmitra

I completely agree with Ukmitra... it seems your company has no clue about the word "transparency" .. They also do not realize that letters or no letters, salaries do come out among peers and friends.. and if I someone came up to me and asked "how did so-and-so know about your salary" I would tell them very angrily "HR, payroll, finance, the admin assistant (who deposits the cheques and files the documents), the IT team who has access to even HR files, the courier company who carries my salary slip to me, your bankers, my bankers, my boss, the entire hierarchy, investors and shareholders, auditors beyond, knows it - ask everyone about who leaked it and give me in writing the response and your findings". I would love to see the expressions on the sub-wit who came to me with the stupid question in the first place.

In today's trend of transparency this seems like a typical stubborn & rigid old world attitude that many HR and top mangements are guilty of globally. A large publicly listed company is statutorily required to disclose employees with remuneration above 2 lakhs p.m. whilst the contract with directors are required to be approved by Ministry of Company Affairs and shareholders. When the top people have their compensation in the public domain does it make sense to hide the compensation, especially by issuing a whip, of people down the hierarchy? An organisation where human resources are converted in to human capital by right hiring, effective nurturing, identified training and lastly performance based compensation / rewards through continual appraisal and evaluation that leads to awareness for further enhancement of knowledge usually would like to show case its right compensation for the right performer policy.

Dealing with Humans the HR of your organisation should know that it is human nature to compete to be better than others. Professionally this gets satiated mostly through higher compensation, perks and designation than one peers. Also, working together for 5-6 days a week for 8 hours together leads to bonding and close friendship when personal issues are freely discussed. Add to this the ancient human interest in the grape vine. It should be clear by now, from the above, that attempting to regulate such matters itself is futile.

Dear friends
Confidentiality can be maintained till completion of process like wage revision, promtion etc.Once order is issued it is not possible to curtain the employees not to reveal the contents of the letter . Employees act in groups and interact among themselves which is prevalent everywhere.
So the management shoule never worry about the confidentiality. greivance If anyamong employees can be solved and it is one of the task of HR
Department
Thankyou.

Transparency is good and there are such things that can not be stopped and the same with confidentiality regarding the salary and perks as it's human nature as they always curious about what other doing or earning in the community or in a group or in a company they work.
You must be familiar with the success of facebook and the idea behind facebook to let people connect the come to know and share the things happening.
So, I would say mentioning the confidentiality issue for the salary etc in the appointment letter is fine but sending warning letter and termination based on that is really a bad and can be worse if followed the same.