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The Wall Street Journal reports on a trend among a small but growing number of companies of letting employees know information that's usually kept secret, including company financials, staff performance reviews and even what everyone is paid. The idea of the approach, which is mostly found in startups, is that it builds trust among workers and makes employees more aware of how their contribution affects the company as a whole. Dane Atkinson, the chief executive of New York data-analytics company SumAll, told the Journal that he and his co-founders believe that people work more efficiently when freed of doubts about salary and better understand their individual contribution to the whole group. On the negative side, however, the Journal cited company executives who said that since workers can see this kind of information that they normally don't, they may weigh in on decisions, which can slow things down. As for the open salary information, CEO Slava Akhmechet of California database firm RethinkDB had a cautionary tale. He told the Journal he experimented with it, but found that potential recruits saw the open salary information as a starting point and bargained for higher pay. He also said that he wound up not being able to hire a highly sought-after applicant without raising everyone else's salaries or getting them to agree to exceptions to the salary structure. The company eventually dropped the open salary policy.