Comp review season is starting, and most People teams I speak to are already dreading it.

The pattern is familiar. Finance approves a budget, managers calibrate behind closed doors, execs make late changes, and employees get a letter with a new number on it and no context.

So the people who expected more come back to negotiate ("I got 3%, I was expecting 4 or 5"). Meanwhile managers are defending numbers they can't fully explain, and the People team spends the next month fielding pay disputes.

Most of that comes from the process running in a black box, and people don't trust what they can't see.

People will live with a smaller increase than they hoped for.

What wears them down is not being able to see how it was decided.

The fix I've helped companies of 60 to 600 people put in place is giving the review a public start and a public finish.

First, separate process transparency from pay transparency

You don't need to publish anyone's salary to do this. You explain how decisions get made, and every individual number stays private.

• Share: the goals of the cycle, the timeline and each person's role in it, compa-ratios by department, how many people sit below band, and average increases by performance rating

• Keep private: the budget, total spend, any individual's salary, and any individual's increase

1. Brief everyone before it starts

Run a town hall before the performance stage kicks off. Cover your comp philosophy, the goals of this cycle (e.g. correcting pay to market or closing equity gaps), the data going in, and the timeline.

The timeline does more work than you'd expect. If someone is hoping for a promotion, it's their cue to raise it with their manager while there's still time to influence it.

2. Keep the middle visible

Post a company-wide update every time a stage closes, and whenever something slips. Give people somewhere to look things up: a process page, an FAQ, a Slack channel for questions and a couple of short recorded explainers.

Managers need their own version, with the deadline and a rough estimate of how long each step will take them. Before letters go out, hand them talking points so they can explain how each outcome was reached.

The test for this stage: nobody should have to ask where the review is up to.

3. Debrief everyone once letters are out

Bring everyone back together and report against the goals you set in the brief, using the same data you showed going in:

• Average increase across the company

• Average increase by performance rating

• Compa-ratio by department, before and after

• How many people are still below band

Employees get context for their own number. And when leaders know the aggregate results will be shown to the whole company, they're far less likely to go off-piste with increases that aren't warranted.

What changes

In my experience, fewer people negotiate after their letter arrives, engagement scores on pay fairness go up, employees thank you for the candour, and the cycle actually hits its goals.

Most of the work is already done, too. The comms plan is just your process written down for the people going through it.

I've written this up in more detail in the latest FNDN Series edition, including the full share/keep-private table, what managers need at each step, and a chart I like for showing before-and-after compa-ratios in the debrief: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/p/curiosity-driven-subject-line-8bfad7cac45e9530

Curious how others here handle it.

Do you run anything like a brief or debrief, or does your review still land as a letter in the inbox?

Hi everyone 👋

I’m Stina, based in Sweden (half Danish, GO Denmark!) and an HR person at heart. I come from recruitment and HR consulting, where I spent years implementing HR processes and systems and slowly turned into an HR tech nerd.

Somewhere along the way I got so tired of all the cool (and some not so cool) HR and payroll tech not talking to each other that I co-founded Twine, where we build modern integrations across work tech in the Nordics. We’re a happy Bob partner, which is how I found my way here.

Twine is my full-time thing these days, but I’m still just as curious about HR, automation and the everyday stuff: what’s working, what’s messy, and what keeps HR up at night.

If you ever want to geek out about HR tech, the parenting-and-work combo, automation or why payroll is never as simple as it sounds, I’m in. Fika is on me ☕

I have a sociology degree and a master's in organizational communication. I've been a salesperson, an academic advisor, a pastor, and a traveling musician. I once wrote that I've had more jobs than Forrest Gump. I meant it.

For a long time, I treated that path as something to explain. Today, I see it as the reason I'm good at this work.

I think about this a lot when I coach people leaders.

So many of you came to HR from somewhere else. Psychology. Teaching. Counseling. Operations. A liberal arts degree a relative once asked you to justify over Thanksgiving dinner.

And I've watched plenty of you treat that background as a gap. Something to make up for with another certification.

But what I've seen, over and over, is the background you're tempted to downplay is often where your edge lives.

The former teacher knows how to make a concept stick in a room full of skeptics. The counselor hears what's underneath the conflict. The writer knows the language that will land. The sociology major spots the pattern before anyone else does.

Those are executive skills. Your peers spent years learning finance, sales, or engineering. You spent years learning people.

What did your road into HR teach you that you still use every week?

Join the In Good Company Denver Chapter for a relaxed social hour focused on connection, curiosity, and the future of HR in the age of AI.

We’re bringing together Denver-area HR and People professionals for an evening of pizza, drinks, live music, and the conversations many of us are already having behind the scenes: what’s actually working with AI, what isn’t, how the HR function is changing, and how we make sure the human side of work doesn’t get lost along the way.

This is a casual gathering with no presentations and no formal agenda. Just a welcoming space to meet peers, exchange ideas, ask questions, and hear how others are navigating the opportunities and challenges ahead.

What to expect:

• Casual networking with HR and People professionals across the Denver area

• Conversation around the future of HR and AI

• Discussion on what’s working, what isn’t, and where teams are still experimenting

• Space to explore how AI can support accessibility and inclusion at work

• Pizza, drinks, live music, and plenty of time to connect

Whether you’re already leading AI adoption, just beginning to experiment, or still figuring out where to start, come curious and ready to share.

📍 Brewability
3445 S Broadway
Englewood, CO 80113

🗓️ November 12, 2026
⏰ 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM MT

Please note: RSVP is required to attend this event.

We're a company of around 150 people across three sites (US, UK and Germany), and we're introducing merit-based pay this cycle. We plan to introduce it at a company-wide town hall, and I'd love your input on how to communicate it.

Context: until now, everyone has received an inflationary increase each year. Over the last year we've introduced a competency framework, performance ratings and consistent development conversations, and now we're connecting them to pay. High performers will clearly benefit, but we expect a large share of colleagues to be rated "meets expectations", and their increase will be close to the old one. For many people the number won't change much, and we don't want to oversell it.

I'd love to hear:

1. Is a town hall the right forum, or did something else work better (team sessions, a video, live Q&A)?

2. What messaging landed well, especially the "what's in it for me" for people in the middle?

3. What would you avoid saying?

4. Any examples or wording you'd be happy to share?

Hands down one of the most mis-managed things a business does, is how it budgets for the compensation cycle.

Here's what happens:

• It comes up to review season.

• No goals get set for the compensation review, simply "we need to do this or people will get upset/we've always done this"

• Finance picks a number it can incorporate into forecasting (usually 2-4%)

• The People team gets tasked with distributing it across employees.

What ends up happening?

That 2-4% budget ends up being used for:

• Market adjustments

• Merit increases

• Promotions

• Corrections that got held over until the comp review because it's "coming up soon anyway, let's just deal with it then"

And year on year, everyone leaves the cycle decidedly unhappy.

• Employees feel like it was never enough and don't have any context about the payment

• People team try to run a structured process that ultimately gets ignored or overridden

• Finance get upset because all this negotiation happens afterwards from unhappy people, which means their budget was pointless anyway.

This is what happens when there is no owner. And guess what?

-> It's the People teams fault.

If this is you — don't wait around — this is 100% one of those beg for forgiveness vs ask for permission types of scenarios. And I assure you, the business will thank you for it later.

I'm not going to spend this post talking about how to budget for the comp review (follow up post if you're interested?), instead the point of this post is that: the People team needs to own the budgeting process for salaries!

It's the biggest cost on any business, and it's being ignored.

Rather than let it be a crappy process year in and year out, take ownership of it. The business will thank you, your people will thank you, and you'll be a commercial leader who takes charge of one of the most critical aspects of the company.

What's stopping you from taking this on?