Ben Zhang· Head of Reward, Bellwether Consulting
Posted in Pay Equity & Transparency ·
A note on sequencing from a state government agency in Victoria, about 1,500 employees. We decided to publish all salary bands internally, with each person's position in their band, eight weeks before the same bands appeared on external adverts.
The reasoning was simple. An employee should never learn what their job is worth from a job board. In those eight weeks managers held a conversation with every team member, and we resolved 64 cases where pay sat below the band minimum or position in band could not be explained.
It was a heavy two months. But when adverts went live we had almost no reaction, because nothing in them was news. I would not do it in the other order.
17 helpful · 1 insightful · 2 agree · 3 replies · 379 views · 6 following
HR Business Partner, Bellwether Consulting
We did it in the other order, under time pressure from a posting requirement in New York, and I can confirm your reasoning from the wrong side. In the first month we had 90 employee queries, two resignations citing the adverts, and managers learning the ranges at the same moment as their teams. If I had eight weeks again I would spend them exactly as you did.
Paula IversenCSI, CRP
People Analytics Lead, Copperfield Mining
Did you show people only their own band or all of them? We published every band to everyone and the unexpected effect was on internal mobility: applications for lateral moves into two better-paid job families rose sharply, and one function lost a fifth of its analysts to another within a year. Probably healthy, but the head of that function did not thank me.
HR Business Partner, Copperfield Mining
All bands, visible to everyone, on the intranet. As a public agency most of it was technically discoverable already, just not in one place. We saw some of the mobility effect too, though smaller. What I underestimated was the manager preparation: we ran 22 briefing sessions, and the managers who skipped them were the source of nearly every escalation.
