At this year's REBA Congress, I had the opportunity to lead a Spotlight session on one of the big-ticket items currently shaping reward strategy: Pay Transparency. Joining me on stage were Michael Cowan from B&Q and Rachael Tate from National Fostering Group, who also shared valuable insights from their own organisational journeys, and together we also fielded questions and comments from the audience. One thing became abundantly clear: Pay Transparency is no longer about whether we publish salary ranges. It's about creating a reward framework that employees can understand, trust and believe in.
Transparency as an evolving expectation
For years, conversations about pay were largely private. Employees may have searched online or compared notes with colleagues, but organisations generally guarded the information closely.
Today, employees increasingly expect to understand what they're paid and why. They're looking for greater openness, consistency and fairness, and those expectations are being driven by several factors: changing workforce demographics, digital and social media, increasing competition for talent and, of course, the growing influence of legislation. Even organisations that aren't directly affected by legislation in the EU are feeling the pressure.
Pay Transparency has become part of the trust contract between employer and employee: more candidates now expect salary and pay range information to be available during recruitment, and organisations that don't do this can appear out of step, and out of date.
Why transparency still feels difficult
Publishing pay bands is often viewed as the obvious first step but that's where the difficult conversations and questions often start:
- How was this range determined?
- Why am I positioned where I am?
- How can I progress my pay?
- Why is someone else paid differently?
Many organisations hesitate because their existing pay structures simply weren't designed to answer those questions.
Broad structures common across the private sector provide flexibility and allow us to respond to market pressures, recruit specialist talent and accommodate different levels of experience within the same grade, but can be difficult to explain when ranges become too wide.
By contrast, narrower pay frameworks with clearer progression more common across the public sector can be easier to communicate but create challenges around pay compression, grading inflation, incremental costs and reduced flexibility. Neither is right or wrong but both have trade-offs.
The hidden pitfalls of rushing Pay Transparency
It's easy to assume that opting for transparency means moving towards narrower pay ranges, but it's rarely that straightforward because greater transparency also means greater scrutiny. Decisions previously made on a case-by-case basis suddenly need to be consistently justified, and exceptions become precedents that are harder to defend.
Without robust governance and clear principles, publishing pay ranges can undermine trust rather than strengthen it. As Michael Cowan shared, B&Q's broad pay bands continue to provide valuable flexibility, but they require significant governance, benchmarking and ongoing manager support to ensure decisions remain fair and consistent.
Designing pay structures with transparency in mind
Ultimately, the right pay design will depend on each organisation's strategy, culture and workforce, so rather than asking "What pay structure should we have?" I would encourage HR leaders to start with "What are we trying to achieve?"
Some key considerations when answering this question will include:
- How important is internal equity to us versus market competitiveness?
- What role should performance play in our pay progression?
- How diverse are our roles?
- How capable are our managers of making and explaining pay decisions?
- What behaviours are we trying to reinforce?
Perhaps most importantly, organisations need to think carefully about what drives pay progression. Too often, pay ranges are introduced without defining how employees move through them, and all this does is create more questions.
A hybrid approach: rethinking how we can structure pay
Increasingly, we're seeing organisations move away from one-size-fits-all structures. Rather than relying solely on broad grades, many are exploring more job-based approaches through job families or role-specific pay ranges. These offer greater alignment with market rates and allow more meaningful conversations about career progression.
Neither solution is perfect - job families can become overly complex or reinforce organisational silos, while role-specific ranges require strong market data and can create too many ranges to manage – and that is why I believe the future lies in hybrid structures.
Case study - during the Spotlight session, I shared the example of a social care provider looking to balance transparency, affordability and career progression. The organisation employs a large frontline workforce, many of them earning close to the Living Wage, while operating within tightly controlled funding contracts. Rather than applying a single structure across the business, we worked with them to introduce three distinct job families covering operational roles, enabling functions and clinical professionals. At the frontline, narrower pay zones were created alongside a competence-based progression framework, allowing employees to see a clearer path for development while maintaining affordability. For more senior professional roles, a different approach was retained to preserve market flexibility. Importantly, they recognised that one solution wouldn't suit every part of the workforce and their willingness to adopt a hybrid approach helped us balance out the desire for transparency with commercial reality.
Summary
Publishing pay ranges is not the finish line, it’s the start of a much bigger conversation. Genuine pay transparency comes from having clear principles, well-designed structures, confident managers and consistent communication. When those elements come together, transparency becomes less about compliance and more about strengthening trust across the organisation.
Justine Woolf is Director of Consulting at Innecto
