Getting ready to publish salary bands

You’re on board the transparency journey and next step is to make your salary bands public externally and internally. Here’s some tips to help you plan for the big launch.

Know your data: assess where you are and where you’re going

Before you make your salary bands public internally you want to understand your data, specifically how your people map across your salary bands. It’s rare that the answer to this is that everyone is in their relevant position in band (according to your reward strategy) and that you have peer parity nailed down. If you do, congrats! But this isn’t you, don’t despair.

Companies often have limited resources to collectively address peer parity challenges or adjust position in band for everyone. To help you plan your journey, consider a staged approach like the one below:

• Understand the budget you have
• Establish your priorities and how you’ll address them in an equitable way
• Determine a roadmap - what’s your ideal scenario and how to get there
• Get leadership/ stakeholder buy in
• Communicate, communicate, communicate - be transparent with your people about where you are, what you can/ cannot change and the journey to get to the ideal scenario you have defined

Introduce, refresh or reinforce your guiding principles

More than ever, transparency will mean accountability. Having salary bands that are public for both internal employees and candidates opens up a range of conversations (and challenges!). This is the time to ensure you have a robust strategy or guiding principles to anchor all your decisions. This will help you justify your approach.

We know that it’s pretty impossible that everyone will always agree with all decisions (specially when it comes to reward!) but if they can understand why you made them, they’re more likely to trust the structures you put in place.

Focus on enablement

You can’t be in all conversations or help everyone every time. The truth is, you don’t need to 🙂

By focusing on enablement you’re allowing others to self-serve, spread the message and be reward champions. Think about who you’re key stakeholders are, how they interact with your salary bands and how you can best enable them. For example:

• Broader people team:
  • Aim? Streamline internal comms and decision making
  • How? Store all your salary band info in one place, provide guidelines on how salary bands are used and frequent training
• External candidates:
  • Aim? Set expectations early in the recruitment process
  • How? Look into interactive reward calculators, and clear job descriptions and share how candidates are mapped to salary bands
• Existing employees:
  • Aim? Promote fairness, equity, trust and career growth transparency
  • How? Have a reward info hub, provide regular training and education session, have a dedicated channel for questions
• Leaders and managers:
  • Aim? Support fair and consistent decision-making
  • How? Have clear compensation guidelines, optimise tooling to enable managers to make informed decisions, provide equity and bias training

Have a comprehensive comms plan

A robust comms plan is key to launching or changing any reward related initiative. (Noticed a pattern in all our blogs? 😁). Just like your focus on enablement, understand your audience groups first. Design a comms plan for each of them tailoring your message and on-going support. It’s not just about broadcasting information; it’s about engaging your teams and creating an ongoing dialogue.

• Ensure the why behind your decision is clear at the core of your comms.
• Have a range of opportunities to receive feedback or answer direct questions from each of your audience groups.
• Don’t forget to be transparent about what’s not happening - for example, if you cannot provide collective salary adjustments to everyone just now, let your team know.

Taking a transparent and honest approach from the start always helps build trust.