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After a meeting about raises, Nia and Marek leave the room together.
— What are you on after the raise?
— I’d rather not talk about my salary.
Nia sees shared information as a way to balance employees’ position against the company. Marek also sees salary as private information that can change relationships between colleagues.
How does Empatyzer balance pay transparency with privacy?
Empatyzer helps you see that salary knowledge can increase transparency, but not everyone wants to disclose their own salary. It also allows you to check how to combine both needs.
Features that can help:
- Your values: Helps you name what values are behind your response to the situation "How much do you earn?" and why for two people the same standard can have completely different importance.
- Organisational culture: Shows the preferred and actual organisational culture, which helps check whether the situation "How much do you earn?" has to do with the dominant norm of the company or team, not just the character of the individuals.
- Tips: Offer practical guidance for the "How much do you earn?" situation: what is worth saying directly, what may be misinterpreted and how to conclude the arrangement.
What really happened
Nia asks Marek about his salary because she believes employees negotiate from a stronger position when they know what comparable work is actually paid. Marek does not deny that information can help. He simply does not want his own pay to become part of the relationship between colleagues. To him, the number can change how people see one another. Nia primarily treats pay information as a tool in relation to the organization. Marek also sees it as private status information between people.
What the research says
A broad review of pay-transparency research suggests that greater transparency can reduce wage differences between similar employees and improve people’s knowledge of the market, while also increasing social comparison and changing employer behavior in negotiations (Cullen, 2023). Research on employee preferences also suggests that many people want transparent rules, salary ranges and pay-setting processes without necessarily wanting individual colleagues’ salaries disclosed; preferences vary across groups (Heisler, 2026). Transparency of the system and compulsory disclosure of personal pay are therefore not the same thing.
How to handle it
Companies can improve fairness through visible salary ranges, job levels and raise criteria without forcing employees to reveal their own numbers. Employees can choose to share salary information voluntarily without expecting others to do the same. The general rule: the more people know about how pay is determined, the less they negotiate in the dark—but a transparent system does not require every individual salary to stop being private.
How Empatyzer and Em can help
Empatyzer should not need access to salaries or evaluate what people “should” earn. It can, however, help Nia and Marek discuss transparency without immediately turning the disagreement into a judgment of character. Motivators related to status, fairness, security or independence can mean that one person sees salary discussion as a way to correct information asymmetry while another experiences it as a private boundary. Em can suggest a simple form: “Are you comfortable talking about this? If not, I won’t push.” At organizational level, it can also support conversations about transparency in processes and ranges rather than other people’s private data. Micro-lessons reinforce that the right to understand the pay system and the right to keep one’s own salary private do not have to conflict.
Sources
- Zoe B. Cullen (2023). Is Pay Transparency Good?. NBER Working Paper, 31060. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31060 10.3386/w31060
- William Heisler (2026). Pay transparency: How much disclosure do employees want?. Business Horizons, 69(1), 43-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2024.11.004 10.1016/j.bushor.2024.11.004
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