Bonus transparency might reveal some ugly secrets

Outlook The salary benchmarking website emolument.com could be accused of statin’ the bleedin’ obvious with its assertion that the majority of bankers are unhappy with their bonuses. But bear with me, because it draws some interesting conclusions from its research. More than 5,000 London-based bankers were given the option of saying they were satisfied, unsatisfied or unsure when it came to remuneration.

Out of the 11 banks included in the research, just two had more bankers in the satisfied camp than in the unsatisfied camp.

The site says that, with secrecy closely guarded, the first unwritten rule any junior learns is to never be seen to be even remotely happy or grateful when their bonus is disclosed.

The default option is to act upset and to intimate that headhunters are in pursuit in the hopes of getting more next time around (although that can be a risky move if an employer decides to call this bluff).

Managers therefore have to deal with unhappy, paranoid staff who throw frequent tantrums and spend more time worrying about what the person at the next desk is earning than they do worrying about doing their jobs and bringing in new business.

The site says that the cure to this would be transparency. If everyone knew what everyone else was getting, they would be able to focus “positive energy” on personal and business development.

It sounds logical, but the problem is that even if our banker knows for certain what the person at the next desk received, if it’s more than their bonus, they’re probably going to be pretty unhappy, particularly if the other guy is a simpering little creep who lacks their talent and only got paid because they went to the same school as the boss.

Then there is the fact that if our banker is female they’re all but certain to be getting less than her male colleagues.

That alone is a powerful disincentive for transparency. It could get very expensive if some of their (relatively) underpaid female staff go knocking on the doors of m’learned friends in an attempt to redress the balance.