50 Shades of Pay Grades: Part 2

In our last edition of “50 Shades of Pay Grades” (blog entry from August 8^th), we first laid out the scene for our “50 Shades of Pay Grades” story.

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the link to Part 1.

As mentioned before, it had taken several days until the proper supervisory staff was alerted to this mysterious document that had been inappropriately posted up on its web site.  The document appeared to list individual staff positions, hourly pay rates, and other compensation-related information.

Here was the ironic “twist” to the story.  Upon closer inspection, the document actually had FALSE information!  For instance, where it listed “Maintenance Technician I” – while there was a pay rate indicated for that position, the pay rate listed actually was completely INACCURATE!  Ditto for ALL of the other listed positions – e.g. “Custodian II”, “Groundkeeper I”, “Security Guard I”, etc., etc.. As it turns out, this curious document came from some sort of other system (or software) that essentially had “placeholders” or “fake data” loaded into it – albeit, still with the actual real position names indicated.

To the casual observer, the document APPEARED to list the pay rates or hourly rates for each position in the organization – and, although no names were specifically mentioned – since this was a relatively small organization, it was not difficult for people to potentially assume who a given position’s title was associated with.  However, the extreme irony is that even though all of the data turned out to be FAKE and INACCURATE – simply having what APPEARED to be this data inappropriately released, caused a great deal of gossiping, speculating, rumors, second-guessing, and “I can’t believe that so-and-so makes such-and-such” kinds of commentary, throughout the organization.

So, one of the “morals” of the story is that even inaccurate data – or misinformation – if released improperly, can still cause a tremendous amount of turmoil, drama, stress, and harm to an organization.

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