How to Find a Coworker’s Salary

Bonfire

The hosts explore ethical and practical methods for employees to discover their coworkers' salaries, beginning with a strong emphasis on examining personal motivations before seeking compensation data. They

Key takeaways

Suzanne negotiated her contract at Kellogg/Northwestern by directly asking colleagues Craig Wortman and Carter Kast for their pay, establishing a culture of open compensation sharing.
Rachel advises checking Glassdoor for insights from former employees or reviewing a nonprofit's IRS Form 990 to track executive and staff salary ranges.

Main topics

salary transparency
workplace negotiation strategies

Notable quotes

"Money is not a radioactive topic. It is not. It's not dirty. It's not impolite."

Conclusion

Listeners gain actionable, ethical frameworks for uncovering compensation data

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Hi, I'm Rachel. And I'm Suzanne. And this is the Bonfire Podcast, where we make your work life better and tell you the things you won't get from HR or your parents. Speaker 2 (0:12) And every single episode, we ask one question and we answer it. And today's question is, how do I find out what my co-worker's salary is? Speaker 1 (0:25) Rachel, how much do you make? No comment. Well, look, we're going to share the real ways you can find this out. And then also the bad sneaky ways to find out and the things that you should absolutely not do, which we know from experience. Speaker 2 (0:45) But before we give you our bag of tricks, we want to invite you to ask yourself a couple of things to consider before you. go straight to like, okay, how do I fix that? How do I find out, right? Ask yourself a few things. Here's one. Are you tying your self-worth so tightly to how much you make that that's really what's driving this question? Because if that's true, finding out is just not going to help you. It's going to lead you down an inflamed pathway that really there is no good story at the end of that one. Oh, yeah. Speaker 1 (1:22) And also, sometimes we make things up like, oh, they must be making so much more. And a lot of that, as you said, is tied to how you feel about yourself. I want you to ask yourself, is my constant bubble over my head, I wonder what they're making. Is that about that person who's sort of irking you because maybe you feel they're not as performing well or they're not as good at their job as you are? Or is it about the position you hold that you feel is not valued? Because you know what? A very wise rabbi once said to me that you can tell what an organization values by just reading their budget. Just read their budget. But it is true. Like you can look at a company's where they're putting their money and talent and really ask the bigger question, you know, what do you value? What do you value? Yep. Speaker 2 (2:22) Okay. So once you've considered those things, meditate on it, you know, pause this podcast just for a second while you go, do I feel as if I have self-worth? Does Suzanne have any more value than me? Absolutely not. Then you can come back to the podcast and now we're going to give you all the tricks of the trade. Speaker 1 (2:42) Let's set ourselves up as good citizens before we get into the stuff that we can tell you how to do that's legal, kind of, but maybe not so much. All right, here's the good stuff. Speaker 1 (2:57) I really do believe in transparency when transparency can be helpful. So I'll give you my own version of that, Rachel. So the place that I really am on a payroll, really for the first time since I was like in my 20s, is at Kellogg at Northwestern. And it is very, very important to me. to know what my colleagues are making there, because it feels like we all do equal work if you're in a particular band. And I really wanted to know when I got there, okay, well, if I'm teaching the same classes as Craig Wortman or Carter Kast, how do I know how much they're being paid so that I can negotiate my own contract? And I will tell you that without them being transparent with me, And I asked them point blank.