EP 99: Pay Transparency Explained: Salary Bands, Equity & Trust
If You’re Afraid to Share Pay Bands, It’s Not Your People. It’s Your Structure.
If the idea of sharing salary ranges with your employees makes your stomach drop, I want to offer a reframe:
It’s not your employees that need fixing.
It’s your structure.
When we hide pay, we’re often hiding inconsistency, insecurity, and the uncomfortable truth about how we value our people financially. And your people feel it, even if you never say it out loud.
This post isn’t about legislation or what states “require.” It’s about stewardship, trust, and building a compensation structure you can actually stand behind.
Why Pay Transparency Feels So Risky
Most leaders aren’t avoiding pay transparency because they’re villains.
They’re avoiding it because transparency shines a light on things they’re not ready to explain.
In my work with organizations, when leaders resist sharing pay bands or talking openly about compensation, it’s almost always because of one (or more) of these:
Inconsistency – People in similar roles paid very differently with no clear logic.
Inequity – Historic bias, favoritism, or “we just really needed to hire someone fast” decisions that never got fixed.
Legacy decisions – Old offers made years ago that were never revisited but still drive current pay.
Silos – Owners making off-cycle offers, rogue managers “doing their own thing,” HR trying to catch up after the fact.
When you publish ranges or explain how pay is decided, you invite scrutiny:
“Why does this person make more than me?”
“What metrics are used?”
“Why did you deviate from the stated range?”
If your current pay practices are largely arbitrary or legacy-driven, of course that feels terrifying.
So leaders say, “Our people will freak out if they see that,” when the real sentence is:
“I’m afraid of what transparency will reveal about how we’ve been running compensation.”
The Real Risk: Not Transparency – Distrust
Here’s what’s already happening in most organizations that avoid transparent pay:
Employees swap numbers privately anyway.
They see your job ads with vague or wide-open ranges.
They talk to friends, check salary sites, and scroll LinkedIn.
They quietly build a story in their heads about what the company “really” values.
And when people don’t have clear, consistent information, they fill the gaps with fear:
“I bet the new guy is making more than me.”
“They say they value us, but they won’t even explain how pay works.”
“If I want a real raise, I probably need to leave.”
That’s disengagement. That’s distrust. That’s quiet job hunting.
The biggest risk of not doing this work is internal distrust and disengagement, not a wave of resignations because you finally published a salary range.
What Pay Transparency Actually Means
Pay transparency does not have to mean a big public spreadsheet with every employee’s exact salary (unless your business model or culture truly supports that).
For most private organizations, healthy transparency looks more like this:
Publishing salary bands or ranges for roles — internally and externally.
Clearly explaining how pay moves happen:
What’s tied to performance
What’s tied to tenure or credentials
What’s tied to role scope or responsibility
Communicating your pay philosophy:
Where do you aim to sit relative to market?
How do benefits and flexibility factor into total compensation?
How do annual increases typically work when the business is healthy?
Transparency is not about dumping every number on the internet.
It’s about giving your people clear, consistent answers to:
“How does pay work here, and what does it look like to grow?”
The Structural Problem Underneath Transparency
You can’t talk meaningfully about transparency without talking about structure.
If your compensation structure is weak, inconsistent, or basically “what we’ve always done,” transparency will expose that.
Most organizations I work with are missing at least one of these foundations:
Job evaluation & job analysis – What is this role actually responsible for?
Pay grades & salary bands – How does this role sit relative to others? What’s the minimum, mid, and max?
Performance metrics – How do we measure impact in this role? What does “exceeds expectations” actually mean?
Goal alignment – How do company goals cascade down to departments and then to individuals?
Without those pieces, pay decisions tend to be:
Reactive
Emotional
Based on whoever negotiated hardest or was hired in a moment of panic
And that’s exactly the kind of thing transparency will surface.
The good news? Once you look at the data, the story becomes clearer—and fixable.
Step 1: Look at the Data (Do a Compensation Study)
Before you change titles or announce new ranges, you start with the truth.
That truth is in your data.
A real compensation study compares:
Current pay – What each person actually earns today
Market data – What similar roles earn in your industry, revenue band, and geography
Internal equity – How similar roles compare to each other inside your own organization
Here’s what that practically looks like:
Pull a simple spreadsheet with:
Employee name
Job title
Start date (or tenure)
Current base pay
Last pay increase date
Layer in:
Job descriptions (if you have them)
Notes on variable pay (bonus/commission)
Then, using real market data (not just a quick Google or a generic salary site), you benchmark each role:
10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th, 90th percentile for:
Your industry
Your revenue size
Your location (or a deliberate benchmark city for remote orgs)
Experience level in the role
Once you map your current pay against that, patterns emerge very quickly:
Are you consistently under the 25th percentile?
Are a handful of people wildly over market?
Are certain departments out of balance with each other?
That’s your starting point.
From there, you can:
Identify outliers (far above or below your intended strategy).
Decide your target position (e.g., “We pay around median because our benefits are strong,” or “We aim for 75th because benefits are light but roles are critical.”).
Start to see where you’ll need adjustments over time, not overnight.
If you don’t have the time, tools, or appetite to do this in-house, this is exactly where an external partner comes in — someone who lives in compensation data and can bring objective clarity to the table.
Step 2: Build Bands and Career Ladders
Once you know where everyone stands, you can design structure instead of reacting to each individual ask.
This looks like:
Creating salary bands for each role or job family:
Example: Paralegal I, Paralegal II, Paralegal III
Tying those bands to clear criteria, such as:
Scope of responsibility
Certifications/licensure
Complexity of work
Level of autonomy
Defining career ladders:
“If you master X, Y, and Z, and demonstrate A and B behaviors, you move from Level I to Level II.”
When people see:
“Here’s the band for your role, and here’s exactly what it looks like to move up,”
it doesn’t just fix pay confusion — it drives engagement and motivation.
Growth-oriented employees (especially younger generations) want to see a path. Salary bands + clear criteria give them one.
Step 3: Communicate Internally with Intention
Once you have data and structure, then you talk.
Not off-the-cuff, not one-off conversations in a manager’s office that only the boldest employees ever hear.
You communicate with a systematic approach, for example:
A company-wide overview of:
Your pay philosophy
The concept of pay bands
How performance and promotions generally work
Department-level sessions explaining:
The specific bands for relevant roles
What it means to be at the lower, middle, or higher end of the band
How to grow within the role or into the next one
You don’t have to share where every single current employee sits in the band right away. You can phase things:
Start with ranges and structure.
Layer in more individual clarity as you complete performance reviews, calibrations, and adjustments.
The posture here is:
Gentle in delivery, strong in purpose.
You’re not dumping raw data in people’s laps. You’re inviting them into a clearer, more consistent system.
Step 4: Practice Incremental Transparency
You do not need a full overhaul in one quarter.
You need intention and consistency.
Here’s an example of a small, powerful sequence:
Next job posting
Publish a real salary range (not “competitive”) and commit to honoring it.
One internal audit this quarter
Choose a single job family (e.g., operations, accounting, or field leadership) and benchmark that group.
Leadership Q&A on pay
Bring HR, finance, and department heads together and ask:
“How are you deciding what a role should pay?”
“What does HR need from you to ensure consistency?”
Compensation data study across the organization
Use that data to draft a 2–3 year roadmap for leveling out inequities and aligning with your intended strategy.
Transparency grows from there:
First in your job ads
Then in your internal conversations
Then in your career ladders and performance conversations
This doesn’t have to be chaotic. It can be deliberate and phased.
“But What If People Leave… or Get Poached?”
You might be asking:
“If we share pay bands, won’t recruiters just pick off our people?”
“Won’t people get jealous if they realize they’re at the low end of the band?”
Here’s the hard truth: if your people are already underpaid, underappreciated, or in the dark… they’re already at risk.
Transparency doesn’t create dissatisfaction. It reveals it.
And it also gives you a structured way to respond:
If someone is at the lower end of the band:
Do they need clearer performance feedback?
Do they need a growth plan?
Are they actually in the wrong role?
If someone is above the band:
Is their title misaligned with their actual responsibilities?
Do we need to expand their scope or adjust the band?
Or are we carrying a legacy decision that needs to be addressed?
If your ranges are competitive and your structure is honest, you won’t just retain people — you’ll attract candidates who value clarity and fairness.
Where to Start This Quarter
If this all feels like a lot, zoom back to one simple set of questions:
What’s one department or job family where you could publish a salary range this quarter?
Where in your organization do people most often wonder, “How do pay decisions even get made?”
Where would more structure relieve the most tension?
Start there.
Pay transparency is not a trend. It’s a structural shift.
And if you’re nervous about it, the root cause isn’t your employees and how you think they’ll react — it’s your structure. That is fixable.
Want Help Doing the Data Work?
If you’re ready to move from “we’re just guessing” to “we have a clear, defensible strategy,” this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients through my Compensation Data Study.
That includes:
Real-world market benchmark data (not generic salary sites)
Internal equity analysis and outlier identification
A multi-year roadmap to:
Adjust pay without blowing up your budget
Build bands and ladders
Communicate ranges with confidence
You can reach out here to start the conversation.
HR Infrastructure Support (HR in a Box)
Your people deserve to know how you value them.
And your business deserves the trust that comes with clarity.
Don’t waste the chaos. Use it to build something better.
