REWARD
The multiple personas of pay transparency
Chris Kirby, Director – Payroll Transformation, LACE Partners, discusses why organisations should consider being more transparent about pay, and how it can be managed in the right way
P ay transparency is often treated as a simple choice – either you share or you don’t. But in practice, it’s more complicated, not least because it’s shaped by multiple personas with competing interests across the employer-employee relationship. On the employer side, transparency must cater to both talent acquisition and retention – goals which often require competing messaging. For employees, generational differences often drive different expectations around pay transparency. Employers need to recognise the strategic importance of understanding these multiple personas and employee expectations if they’re to successfully implement pay transparency. What is pay transparency? It’s important to explore what pay transparency actually means. It isn’t just about providing visibility to data. It’s also about building a narrative for employees and candidates to understand what their today and tomorrow may look like if they work for you. Organisations need to recognise, and then address, what people think they don’t know. This is often the same for both current employees and candidates. There are the basics: what’s the value of the role? How does it fare compared to the market and competitors? But what people often really want to know is where they stand today and crucially, where they’re heading. It’s also about the ‘why’. Particularly for current employees, enough information needs to be available to justify the pay level. Dissatisfaction is rarely because of a number
alone, more often it’s down to misalignment of role value. Providing clarity around how roles are benchmarked and that there’s consistency across the organisation resolves a key challenge. As well as providing clarity around where people stand and why, a critical enabler is to ensure your people know what their pathway looks like. Showcasing how pay evolves with progression is important for both current employees and candidates. The importance of managers Organisations must empower and enable their managers for pay transparency to work. As with most things, ticking the box of providing the information on an internal web page is just the start. Managers need to communicate openly with their teams, sharing how decisions are made and how performance links to compensation. It must become part of how people management is done. The best, most comprehensive frameworks and information may be in place, but if managers shy away from the topic, don’t understand the importance of it or don’t recognise it as part of their role, those frameworks can quickly be undone.
balanced. While employers may see pay transparency through an acquisition and talent lens, employees made up of several generations and therefore expectations, will view transparency differently. Older workers may not feel comfortable with pay transparency initiatives for example, while younger employees may view transparency as a foundation of trust. This matters, because more than ever, employers are navigating a diverse range of employees expectations in the workplace. The modern workforce ranges from people who entered employment when everything was done manually, information was in a textbook and pay discussions were often a disciplinary offence, to the younger, digital-savvy generation who are used to automation and have access to almost every bit of information they could ever need. So, fundamentally, when it comes to pay transparency, organisations need to manage these different personas and everything in between. They need to manage views and expectations such as, ‘I don’t want anyone knowing anything about my pay’ or ‘If I don’t know where I stand and where I’m heading, you’re hiding something’. Pay transparency initiatives must be managed effectively and cater for these multiple personas and employee expectations. Examples of how organisations can navigate this are by: Using ranges To account for progression through capability or tenure, base transparency on ranges by role rather than set figures.
Multiple personas and generational differences
Yet, beneath all this lies another layer of complexity which impacts an organisation’s approach to pay transparency: multiple personas – employers and employees – each with differing and often conflicting needs, which must be acknowledged and
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | December 2025 - January 2026 | Issue 116 38
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