Improvements for Payroll Transparency

[jmcameron]

Here is a suggested addition to the payslip.

When employees receive their payroll slips, I am concerned that they will have very little idea of how their pay is computed. The payslip in the PR gives the values of the 3 indexes but that tells an employee very little (on its own). I suggest added three columns beside the indexes that show the minimum, mean or median, and maximum values of those indexes. That serves several purposes:

• It will help the employee understand their standing and pay with respect to the rest of the employees
• It can be used by their managers to help employees understand how their pay is computed
• It can be used by their managers to help encourage the employees to step up their performance, get more education, etc
• It will make the entire payroll process more transparent

I am also concerned that the this payroll system is not very transparent and could be abused by the hospital administrators / accountants to skew the pay towards the upper employees and reduce the pay for employees on the low end. Making the range of the indexes clear to all employees would help reduce that possibility.

Note that the index values are simply added together so the weighting between indexes (education, function, seniority) are solely determined by size/range of the numbers for each index. In the examples in the documentation, the numbers for education are quite a bit larger than the ones for responsibility and seniority. This implies that the education is more highly weighted in the payroll computations than other things like seniority. That means the administrators need decide the relative importance of each index by deciding what range of numbers to use for each index. This is not a trivial decision. It might have been better to have the numbers for each index be in the same range (say 0-10) and then have a weighting coefficient for each index to compute the total of indexes in a way that makes the relative weighting very clear and obvious. Using larger numbers for indexes also impacts the fixed pay per person since it is based on dividing the fixed part of the pay envelope by the sum of the indexes.

This could be added a an option (via the payroll settings page)

[jniles]

I think this requires more discussion before being implemented. While I like the transparency thought behind it, I worry that it will cause more problems than it solves, and I don't see precedence for it.

For example, I can't think of any other job that I've had where I knew the average, median, and range of salaries of my coworkers.

Most hospitals already provide an analogous way to see the relationship between the employees - either by job title/grade or by "index." However, this masks the fact that the hospital admin gets 25x the salary of the janitor. This may be an abuse, or it may just be the cost structure of the hospital.

I wonder if, instead of the individual mean/min/max stats, we show the overall revenue of the institution, and the percentage being spent on salaries (for example, 60% on salaries). We could also show the historical amount of money the employee has been paid and how this month compares to the previous months.