Voices in Leadership • 9 MIN READ
The CHRO's Case for Radical Pay Transparency
JUN 13, 2026
Publishing salary ranges feels terrifying until you realise that your employees already know more than you think. One CPO makes the case for going further than the law requires.
What transparency actually means
When I talk about pay transparency, I do not just mean publishing salary ranges in job adverts, though that is a necessary minimum. I mean being willing to explain the logic behind pay decisions: why the band is set where it is, what determines where an individual sits within the band, how pay progression works, and what the criteria are for promotion. Without that context, a salary range is just a number. With it, you are building the foundation of a trust relationship.
The objections I hear most often
The most common objections to pay transparency are: employees will be upset if they find out colleagues earn more than them; it will constrain our ability to make individual pay decisions; and it will damage our competitive position in hiring by revealing what we pay. None of these has held up in my experience. The first two are only problems if you have not been making pay decisions consistently and fairly, in which case transparency is the catalyst for a necessary conversation, not the cause of the problem. The third inverts the evidence: organisations with transparent pay attract more applicants, not fewer.
How I implemented it
We started with salary bands: designing a job architecture, benchmarking every role, and publishing the band for each grade across the organisation. We trained managers to have pay conversations using the bands as a framework. We ran a pay equity audit before publishing and corrected any gaps we found. The first few months were uncomfortable: there were questions we had not anticipated and a few employees who found out they were in a lower band than they expected. But two years in, pay-related grievances are down 60%, and our offer acceptance rate for external hires is at its highest level in five years.
