How to Break an NDA, See If Your Pay Is Fair, Confront a Colleague, and More

If you’ve been the object of bad workplace behavior, knowing your options can be the first step to getting justice. Let this guide be your road map for navigating some all-too-common scenarios.

You suspect your colleagues may be making more than you, but you can’t know for sure without asking them—which you’d really rather not do.

① Ease in
Truth is, the best information comes from inside your company. If you have friends in similar roles, go to them first. “Think of it as a research project. I think a lot of people feel more comfortable with a research project than they do negotiating compensation,” says Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Your best-case scenario is getting to ask someone who’s leaving the company and therefore no longer has any skin in the game.