How is the new openness agenda going to work and what exactly is its purpose, asks James Bennett, head of content at internal communications research and training company Melcrum Publishing

People’s salaries are rather like two-year-old toddlers. They’re sensitive things we like to nurture, keep to ourselves and rarely release into the public domain just in case they cause mayhem.

Earlier this month, however, our new Prime Minister David Cameron and his yellow-shirted coalition chums the Lib Dems asked high-ranking civil servants to reveal their salaries: 170 civil servants who earn £150,000 or more – more than the PM himself who took a cut at the beginning of his tenure – agreed, while 11 murky mandarins declined. Even GOD (Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service) was outed with a salary of just over £235,000.

Cammo wants to go further. By early next year, Whitehall will have to publish the pay of every civil servant earning more than £58,000 a year. I’m not quite sure how they’re going to take that considering that includes the majority of the British public sector?

I don’t mind talking about my salary – not since a disgruntled employee at a newspaper I used to work for hacked into the company’s database, copied and pasted the entire newsroom’s salaries and emailed them over to WikiLeaks, a website famous for drip feeding inflammatory content. Newspapers got hold of the dirt, republished it and our internal processes were made to look about as robust as the Sex and the City 2 plotline. 

Worse still, was the internal friction it caused. Senior managers told us not to look, so what was the first thing we did? It was too good to miss – until journalists and reporters discovered lesser talented colleagues earning more than them. It wasn’t pretty. 

So how is the new openness agenda going to work and what exactly is its purpose? The public sector it seems, rather like my former colleagues and I a year ago, has been left with very little choice. They’re facing a barrage of enormous budget cuts and thousands of redundancies so revealing their salaries is the last thing they should be worrying about.

Communicating this within an organisation however, would be an incredibly complex exercise. “Er yes, Bob, I know you’ve been working here for 30 years and your salary has only risen 20% compared to the CEO’s 400% rise, share options and bonus last year.”

Adam Crozier, former chief executive of the Royal Mail and now at ITV, must know what I’m talking about. He fortunately slipped out at the right time and has left the communications team at the embattled and soon-to-be-partly-privatised ‘logistics service’ to deal with the news that he walked away with a £2.4 million pay off in his final 12 months of ‘service’.

But in an age where news travels faster than practically any internal process can handle, this could well be part of our working future and the responsibility of HR and internal communications to get right. Everyone’s details, depending of course on permission, could be posted on the company’s social network under name, skills, qualifications and hobbies helping businesses achieve more transparency. Many of the world’s most successful organisations regularly communicate their budgets, profits and bonuses. This leads to a more tightly knit and engaged workforce where everyone knows how much the company makes and how much it needs to achieve its financial goals. One goal, one workforce from top to bottom. All that’s left is to tell us how much you earn? So go on then, spill the beans…