Armstrong´s job evaluation handbook – Michael Armstrong

Introduction

A guide to achieving fairness and transparency in pay and reward. The book covers a lot of differet topics about hr in businesses. It is extremely important that employees in your company are compensated fairly for their work. Why is salary transparency so important? How can we make the gender wage gap smaller? How can we decide what is fair to pay our staff? How can we ensure that that our salaries remain competitive on the market? And How can we ensure that work of equal value gets payed equally? This book gives wide understanding to all of these questions and a lot of other very useful information.

Why would the question ‘How much does the person next to you  get paid’’ be interesting to anyone. The reason salary transparency is important is not only because employees could negotiate larger salaries to themselves. It has been discovered with different surveys that mostly in businesses, that are not transparent in their rewards, over 70% of employees feel that they are underpaid and over 40% say that they are thinking of quitting even tho they are satisfied with their position and salary. This tells that not being transparent creates a bad atmosphere where employees are not satisfied and not committed fully.

This book opened my eyes about some matters I had not heard about before. I have been getting important and different viewpoints on this topic. How could i be a better employed and a employee in questions about salary and also for an example, why you should know how much your coworkers get paid? These questions are not in discussions nearly as much as it would be needed in my opinion. Still talking about your or anyones salary is a tabu. Luckily many people and companys are becoming and striving to be transparent with this matter. Usual opinion and belief  is that “all hell would break loose” if everyone would be transparent with their salaries, due to the higher pay recuirements and ´people quitting their jobs. Actually due to the studies it does quite the opposite if you ate transparent, the working ev´nviroment becomes  more open. People dont have to wonder and estimate anything, they wont have to be jealous of their colleagues because all of the information is already out for everyone to see. Also it is a employees right to discuss  salaries vith other people inside the company, even though I read that some companies have tried to make it forbidden.

I think reading this book benefits my team because it is important to know about the transparency and fairness in all companies. Allthough in the beginning i guess we wont necessarily employ anyone from outside the team. The book also had quite a bit of unnessessary information that i wont use in practice, such as more spesific information about HR work in larger businesses. So I would not recommend this book to for my classmates allthougt i found the topic very interesting.

In conclusion this book and the topic fairness and transparency in pay and reward was a very interesting topic to read about. The book had lots of different perspectives from the employees and the employers point of views and the writer was very addressing his thoughts  very clearly about the transparency matter and why it is so important. Transparency and fairness in business is key to happy employees and a succeeding business.