Regulation in PracticeDon't build a new data silo for pay transparency
Most of the information you need already exists. The difficulty is that today, it doesn't necessarily describe the same reality.
Björn Slegers ·
New regulations almost automatically lead to new files. A project group is put together. Payroll provides the figures. HR exports jobs and contract data. Someone combines everything in Excel, a BI tool, or a separate reporting tool. For the first report, that can work perfectly well. The danger begins after that. Because while the report is being built, the day-to-day organisation just carries on.
New employees start. Jobs change. Promotions are granted. Salaries are adjusted. Exceptions arise. A year later, the reconstruction starts all over again. That's why for us, pay transparency is not just a reward or compliance question. It's also an architecture question.
Most of the data already exists
Much of the basic information needed for pay transparency is already located somewhere in the organisation. Salary. Contract. Job. Work pattern. Organisational unit. Variable components. But on their own, these data points don't say enough. A salary figure without job context doesn't tell you if two employees are doing comparable work.
A job title doesn't necessarily say how much responsibility is actually attached to the role. And a historical salary decision may have been perfectly correct, yet today nobody knows what criteria it was based on. The real challenge, therefore, is not just collecting data. It is retaining meaning.
A report can be correct even when the underlying process is not
That's why a separate reporting reality can be both attractive and dangerous. For a single moment, you can clean up all the data. Group jobs neatly. Explain discrepancies. Fill in missing information. The report is correct. But the next day, the organisation is back to making decisions using the same underlying processes as before.
Then the next discrepancy simply arises all over again. Sustainable transparency therefore requires more than an annual reconciliation. The same job context needed to analyse pay gaps should also be useful when a new employee is hired. The same criteria that objectively explain a pay gap should also be relevant when a manager is preparing the next pay rise.
Then, compliance shifts. From something that is checked after the fact, to something that increasingly emerges from the way work is organised.
Less reconstruction, more explainability
In our view, that is also the greater opportunity. Not building a perfect report alongside the organisation. But making the organisation itself more explainable. If you can do that, the reporting ultimately becomes the least interesting part of pay transparency. Because in the meantime, you will also have better job context, better-documented decisions, and less dependence on historical spreadsheets.
A new rule doesn't always have to create a new system.
Sometimes, it is a good reason to finally better connect the disparate parts of your existing reality.
Pay Transparency in Almuruna One