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?