Robert Sheen is founder and CEO of Trusaic, a purpose-driven technology company focused on pay equity, DEI and healthcare.
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Nearly 80% of companies consider pay equity to be an organizational priority, given its profound benefits for both companies and their employees. However, a majority of organizations are perceived as average or below when it comes to their approach. Considering transparent communication around salary is a matter of importance to most employees, to the point that it affects their desire to stay with an employer, it's vital to have the right strategy in place. After more than 10 years of assisting employers with their pay equity initiatives, I’ve seen how important transparency and communication are to their success.
As companies dive into the process of educating their organizations on pay equity—how it fits into their overall compensation philosophy, how pay and equity are determined, changes being made to close pay gaps, etc.—they’ll have to plan for and manage the considerable communications challenges they’ll face. After all, it's not as straightforward as communicating about the rollout of a new 401(k) plan or a change to employees’ medical benefits. Pay practices are often more nuanced and complex.
Equally challenging, pay equity is a journey of incremental progress. It takes commitment, transparency and candor to address pay inconsistencies, explain how pay is determined, share plans for making pay practices more fair and equitable over time and follow up with regular reports.
Tips For Communications Planning
Creating a well-crafted plan is step one in effective pay equity communications. Here are some best practices and helpful tactics worth considering.
Lay out your plan.
Begin by segmenting your audiences, such as executives and the C-suite, managers, HR and Talent Acquisition team members, employees, and investors and shareholders. You might wish to segment these groups further by management level, salary level, size of pay gap, etc., so you can determine who needs to know what and in what order the communications should flow.
Craft your messaging.
While you must tell a consistent story across communications to all your stakeholders, you’ll need to customize key messages for each group. Your executive team, for instance, will be interested in the impacts of pay equity on the bottom line, investor perceptions, employee performance and morale, and legal risks. Employees, on the other hand, will be more interested in how pay equity impacts them personally and how you plan to close pay gaps.
Outline your key messages to each audience with detailed instructions on how to deliver these messages. Think about discussing your current equitable pay processes, the progress you’ve made to date and what audiences can look forward to.
Choose your channels.
You can use a wide variety of communications channels—one-on-one discussions, team meetings, emails, intranet messaging, even social media, press releases and/or company reports—depending on your audiences’ preferences and the appropriateness of each channel. Instead of discussing employee pay adjustments via email, for example, teams might prefer to have their managers meet with them in person. However, the elimination of a pay disparity for an entire department could very well be communicated during a team meeting.
Set up your communications schedule.
As with all communications plans, timing will be driven by a number of factors, including milestone dates, messages, other elements of your business and talent strategies and how quickly you are trying to achieve pay equity. What matters most is committing to ongoing discussions and routine progress reports. You could also align more general updates with all-hands meetings and annual reporting. Work with the necessary functions, departments and stakeholders to develop a schedule that supports your goals.
Share accountability.
Achieving pay equity is a company-wide responsibility. A number of functions, departments, leaders and individuals must work together and share accountability for equity to take root. Create a pay equity committee to steer your overall plan, and hold managers and department heads responsible for issuing pay equity communications and holding discussions.
Clearly identify specific individuals in your plan, what they’re responsible for and how they’ll be held accountable. You might also want to task these individuals with regularly sharing progress reports. Some organizations even tie their leaders’ compensation to achieving pay equity goals—the ultimate form of shared accountability that publicly demonstrates the company’s commitment to equity from the top down.
Organizations that aggressively share accountability not only make greater progress toward pay equity but are also further along in terms of pay equity maturity.
Put your plan into action.
Launching your communications plan will put your organization well ahead of many others that continue to hesitate about discussing pay equity. However, before launch, you might want to get validation and guidance from someone with deep pay equity expertise. Depending on their knowledge, these people could provide counsel across the entire process of achieving and sustaining pay equity, from initial audit to continuous monitoring and remediation to long-term planning and ongoing communications.
These tips and best practices merely scratch the surface. But remember, stakeholders don’t expect perfection. They simply want you to take action and make gradual progress toward pay equity. Even your employees don’t expect perfection. They want to know that you value and respect them. Show them you do by embracing pay equity and communicating openly about your pay practices, the rationale behind them and where your organization stands on its journey toward improvement.
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