Apple has reportedly barred employees from discussing pay equity, according to The Verge. Charter Co-Founder & CEO Kevin Delaney joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: The debate over a return to work adding to tensions between Apple and some of its employees– “The Verge” is reporting that the tech giant is shutting down internal surveys employee groups have been conducting over a hybrid return to work and pay equity. For more on that, let’s bring in Kevin Delaney, Charter Co-Founder and CEO.
And, Kevin, this is a reporting out from “The Verge,” but, of course, you’ve been looking a lot at the policies of companies as it relates to this new work environment. How much of what’s happening at Apple you think is unique to the company? How much of that you think points to this push and pull that’s been happening between employees and executives?
KEVIN DELANEY: Yeah, so what is happening in a lot of companies, increasingly, is that employees are taking matters into their own hands around compensation, and specifically collecting data– so setting up spreadsheets where they ask their colleagues to input their salaries, their compensations, along with race, and gender, and disability information as well.
So this is done anonymously, but basically you create a survey, you ask people anonymously who work for the same company to put in this information. And then you attempt to glean whether people are being treated differently by their gender, and their race, and whether they have disabilities. Now, Apple in this circumstance, in this instance has said that it actually doesn’t treat people unequally.
But there is an element, employees believe, that Apple is telling them to just trust them, trust the company– that there aren’t these inequities. And the employees are saying, like, actually, we want to figure out for ourselves whether this is true. This is not unique to Apple, Apple just happens to be a high profile case.
And what has happened now is that Apple has told the truth the employees who are doing these surveys that they shouldn’t be doing them, that it’s against public– company policy. And that’s why it’s sort of breaking out into the open.
BRIAN CHEUNG: Kevin, this is a bit of a tricky question, because on one hand, yes, pay transparency would allow you to see if, indeed, the company is treating certain people or certain groups of people that work for them differently than others. But then on the other hand, I think there is a valid concern from a company standpoint that too much transparency would create too much of a cutthroat environment as people within their own teams look to say, that person is making more than me. I’m doing more work. So what is the proper balance of having the transparency so that the company can prove that it is treating people equally, but then on the second hand, not creating so much transparency that the work culture itself starts to degrade as well?
KEVIN DELANEY: Yeah, I think there are two layers here. And one of the layers is there’s this question of, is transparency good in general? And I think we’re actually increasingly seeing companies experiment with this. There is a company called Buffer that actually has full transparency. So you can actually, as anyone, go onto their website and click through to a spreadsheet to see what the compensation is for anyone at the company.
Their belief is that this is actually a way to have fairer compensation. So if it’s out in the open, you’re much less likely to have a gap between men and women, for example, in terms of pay. And we know that there are actually still persistent pay gaps– or pay gaps by what people’s race are. So you know, Buffer’s an interesting example, and there have been there has been some research done on that company for how they’ve handled it.
My sense is that it’s not more cutthroat. But while Buffer’s original intent was that it would allow people to think about paid less because they had confidence that they were being paid fairly relative to their colleagues, what their actual experience was was there wound up being a lot of conversations about pay, and it wound up being more of a preoccupation than they originally expected.
