Can you stop employees discussing pay?

Many employees don’t like talking about their salary with their colleagues but depending on the culture of your workplace you may find the opposite and that problems arise with disgruntled employees.

You may be surprised to know that legally there is nothing you can do to stop them.

Why would you want to stop discussions about salary?

There are lots of reasons why employers might want to stop discussions about salary amongst employees. For example, if you are paying different employees hugely different salaries for performing the same job you may be anxious about information getting out.

If you aren’t purposefully trying to pay employees unfairly, it can still be a shock for a colleague to find out that somebody with a similar job role is making more money than they are. Rumours and gossip can also cause unpleasant atmospheres in the office.

It is understandable that you might want to stop employees discussing their salaries. It is, however, it is illegal to stop employees from sharing details of their pay under the Equality Act 2010.

Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act 2010 stops you from putting clauses in your contract and employee handbook that prohibit discussion of salary.

Therefore, if you discipline somebody for sharing their salary, you could end up in trouble yourself. You can’t even add it as a clause to your employment contract, because it would not be legally enforceable.

Can you ever discipline an employee for sharing their salary details?

There could be some circumstances where salary disclosure forms part of another offence. If somebody is using salary disclosure as a way to bully their colleagues, then of course this behaviour is inappropriate, and you would be likely to discipline the offender.

For example, Employee A might be making Employee B feel small, by constantly bragging about his or her salary, or something of the sort. But the discipline would be on different grounds – not literally because the employee had disclosed their salary.

It is, of course, better if your workplace culture means that you are relatively open about salaries in your business but even if you aren’t it is important to ensure that everyone is paid fairly and there are no anomalies in the rates of pay for your team.