In any business, creating a positive work environment is key to success.

When one rude employee tested that rule, the consequences were as clear as the company’s open-book policy.

Read on for the full story!

Snoop to find salaries? I’ll post them for everyone.

My wife and I own a balloon decor company with 8 employees.

They care a lot about who they hire.

We take pride in paying a living wage and creating jobs for folks who might not fit in the traditional workforce.

We’ve come up with one inviolable rule in hiring: “No Mean People!”

They’ve been burned before by one particularly difficult employee.

Erin was the reason we instituted this rule.

She was rude to the other staff and sometimes the customers, considering herself better than the rest of the sales team.

She also wasn’t even that great at her job.

She also made frequent and sometimes costly errors, shifting the blame when she could or downplaying them when she couldn’t.

Erin had a steady stream of complaints to the boss (me) about her terrible co-workers and a steady stream of complaints to her co-workers about her terrible boss.

Incompetence aside, she was also rude and selfish.

She loved snagging the high-value inquiries before anyone else and then complained that we paid hourly rather than on commission.

Our whole sales team (3 people) had unrestricted access to QuickBooks so they could create invoices and bill clients.

But then came the snooping.

One day, my awesome sales manager told me that Erin had logged into the HR portion of QuickBooks and was looking at everyone’s paychecks.

She wanted to know what the manager made so she could argue for a raise. (A raise she didn’t deserve because she was barely holding onto her job at that point.)

But the boss always prided themselves on being transparent.

I laughed because pay rates have never been a secret.

The whole company’s finances are an open book, and I feel every one of our crew should be able to know our gross, net, material costs, wages, owner wages, debts, or anything they ask.

If Erin had only been upfront…

If she’d have asked, I would have told her exactly what the sales manager made and what she needed to do to get a raise.

Somehow, she thought she could gain an advantage by being sneaky.

So the boss decided to fire back in an unexpected way.

The next day, I asked my bookkeeper to print out everyone’s pay rate.

I taped the printout to the whiteboard for everyone to see.

Only Erin knew why it had suddenly appeared, and she was ticked!

A few weeks later, she was gone from the company.

The boss saw this as an opportunity to solidify the company’s culture.

I wrote up a “Who We Are” document for the whiteboard that every new employee sees.

It promises wage and financial transparency and has only one sentence capitalized: “NO MEAN PEOPLE.”

The truth always comes out one way or another.

What did Reddit make of all this?

While pay transparency is admirable, it would be prudent to safeguard certain sensitive information.

Funny how the worst employees can sometimes end up weeding themselves out.

Turns out, Erin’s name was strangely prescient.

This commenter has a differing point of view.

Erin may have thought her actions would give her the upper hand, but her bosses were still two steps ahead.

The lesson Erin learned was clear: honesty and kindness are non-negotiable in this workplace.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.