Introducing open salary bands for employees is a project that many People and Rewards teams are taking on this year.
This could be about making all salary bands transparently available to employees. Or it could be for certain parts of the company e.g. employees have access to salary bands within their own job family.
Some companies are embracing open salary bands to improve employee engagement and motivation through building trust in how their pay and progression is handled.
Others are making it a priority to get ahead of incoming regulations like the EU Pay Transparency Directive, which means that companies will soon be required to implement more transparent pay practices and internal communications about those practices.
To find out more, we spoke to pay transparency expert Vicky Peakman to find out how new pay transparency laws will impact how companies need to communicate their compensation approach with employees.
Plus, we also spoke to Eamonn Stanley, Head of Reward at Typeform, about his experience with rolling out open salary bands at Typeform earlier this year.
There are lots of different ways to introduce more transparent pay practices as a company, but for Vicky Peakman, Founder of Fair Pay Partners, “giving employees access to all salary bands is the right level of transparency for most companies to aim for as an end goal.”
There are a few key reasons for this.
From June 2026, the EU Pay Transparency Directive will be in force across all EU member states.
“Whereas pay transparency laws over in the US have focused on the hiring process, banning discussions on salary history and making it mandatory to share the salary range for the role with candidates,” Vicky says, “the EU Pay Transparency Directive adds to this with a new focus on existing employees having a strong understanding of compensation practices.”
The key changes to be aware of for employee communication purposes are:
“Overall, companies will need to be comfortable with communicating their compensation philosophy and the core principles behind how decisions are made,” explains Vicky, “but also with sharing some of the intricate numbers that are currently typically only visible behind-the-scenes.”
Introducing open salary bands, with employees able to access the band structure across all roles and levels, ensures you’ve definitely gone above and beyond compliance for incoming legislation.
“The incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive means that EU employers need to start building understanding amongst their employee base on how compensation decisions are made."
Founder of Fair Pay Partners
Vicky’s advice for preparing for the EU Pay Transparency Directive is to “start small, and start now.”
“You don’t need to start with a complete set of documentation for employees,” she says, “that will only overwhelm you and your team.”
“I’d suggest starting with the context for the numbers that you’ll eventually be sharing. Explain the core principles behind how compensation decisions are made in the company, and build incrementally from there.”
“It’s also well worth running a session entirely on the legislation itself, to explain to employees what the EU Pay Transparency Directive is, why it’s being implemented, and how the company will be responding,” says Vicky, “it’s a big cultural change in how pay is handled, and employees might not even be aware of it.”
The core reason behind pay transparency legislation is to ensure equitable pay for all employees – regardless of factors like gender which have historically been discriminated against in hiring and pay practices.
Pay discrimination can only be eliminated by first bringing compensation inconsistencies to light – which only truly happens when employees have access to all salary bands across the organisation.
If there is no transparency, or limited transparency (such as employees having access only to their own salary band) then the lack of visibility makes it very hard to understand when discrimination might be occurring.
If pay equity isn’t enough, there are lots of other benefits to introducing open salary bands.
Compensation has historically been a taboo subject kept behind closed doors, with employees having little understanding of why they are paid the way they are.
That often leaves employees feeling confused about their compensation, perhaps feeling that they aren’t being paid fairly. It also leaves them with a lack of agency when it comes to key moments in their career like performance review conversations or entering salary negotiations for a potential new role.
When employees understand how compensation decisions are made, they gain trust that the company’s leaders are making decisions in their best interest which has positive impacts on employee engagement, motivation, and productivity.
Plus, they gain the ability to better advocate for themselves too, enabling better conversations about pay and performance – which can be hugely beneficial for retention objectives.
Some companies are going even further than opening up salary bands to all employees, by sharing all individual salaries internally – or even externally, in open salary systems like Buffer’s.
For Vicky, whilst this might make sense for some companies who adopt an open culture as a core value, it’s “too much for most companies” to take on as an approach.
“Making salary bands transparently available to all employees is already a huge project to take on and a huge shift in how compensation is communicated within a company,” she says, “we don’t all need to aim for public salaries.”
Plus, Vicky also highlights that whilst employees embrace transparent pay practices, they might not be keen on having their individual salary shared. “Some people are fine with having their salary shared,” she says, “but others see it as a deeply personal matter and will feel uncomfortable with this level of transparency.”
These are downsides that Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer, has also openly spoken about with regards to their public salary system – whilst it’s worth it for them, striking the right balance is an important consideration when deciding what level of pay transparency to aim for.
“To me, a ‘fully transparent’ approach would be making all salary bands available to employees. It provides clarity on the compensation structure and brings inequities to light, without going as far as to share individual salaries.”
Founder of Fair Pay Partners
During our Reward Community Office Hours session in February 2025, we surveyed 80 Reward Leaders about their plans for implementing transparent pay practices in their current company.
The majority (45%) are opting for a partially transparent approach, wherein employees have access to only their own salary band.
Only 2% of the Reward leaders we surveyed are planning to introduce fully open salaries wherein employees have access to the individual salaries of their peers.
Open salary bands might sound great in theory, but how do you actually introduce them in practice? As we’ve seen, it’s a big cultural shift in how companies typically communicate about compensation, so it needs to be handled correctly.
Eamonn Stanley, Head of Reward at Typeform, recently went through this exact process with his team.
In early 2025, Eamonn rolled out open salary bands at Typeform. For them, the transparency has been per job function, providing employees with access to the salary bands for all job levels within their own job function.
This project made sense for Typeform for a few key reasons.
Typeform has a ‘people first’ culture focused on empathy and understanding – including internal communication, with open communication and feedback between leadership and the wider team a key tenet of the company’s approach.
Eamonn explains that this “naturally extends into the People strategy, with an overall desire to be transparent as a company and a leadership team.”
From the employee feedback mechanisms that Typeform had in place, “we were also hearing that employees wanted more transparency around compensation specifically,” says Eamonn, “so we needed to act on that.”
Beyond this, improving pay transparency also aligned with wider objectives for the People & Rewards team.
“There’s a lot of research available now about the positive impact of transparent pay practices on employee motivation and productivity,” Eamonn explains. “We were also particularly keen to enable line managers to have better conversations about compensation and performance with their direct reports, which again we know has a hugely positive impact for engagement and retention objectives”.
"For Typeform, the decision to introduce transparent salary bands was down to a combination of company culture, employee feedback, and research on the positive impacts on team motivation and productivity.”
Head of Reward at Typeform
In the early days of the project, the right level of transparency for the team was a key debate amongst the People & Rewards team and Typeform’s leadership team.
Ultimately, the decision was that employees should be able to access all salary bands for their own job function.
“This felt like the right balance for our team to start with,” Eamonn says, “but we’ll of course be reviewing and iterating from here on out, it’s still very early days. I’m particularly interested in ensuring we’re transparent across total compensation, beyond just salary.”
For Eamonn, the decision to include all pay levels within the transparency was an important factor.
“One key debate was whether the salary bands for all job levels should be shared openly, or whether we should cap it at senior management and not share director and executive pay bands,” he says. “The general consensus was that limiting the levels shared didn’t feel fair because some members of the team would have more information than others, so we decided to include all levels.”
For many companies, the fear of opening up salary bands to employees is that it will spark a lot of questions and concerns about the fairness of compensation – especially if inconsistencies and inequities are visible.
Typeform already had a great foundation for consistent compensation decisions, so this was less of a concern.
“A core principle of our overall compensation philosophy is that no employee should ever be below the minimum of their salary range,” Eamonn explains, “we review bands quarterly and run two merit cycles a year, all of which are key moments in our Rewards process to make sure any issues are rectified.”
“When we started the project of introducing transparent bands, we went into it with a clear agreement that we weren’t aiming to fix any problems,” Eamonn says, “but rather to enable employees to better understand how compensation decisions are made.
“We did take it as an additional opportunity to flag potential issues to managers that could raise questions, like a low compa ratio for instance, but that was all that was needed in our case because we already had a solid compensation structure in place.”
Whilst the timing was right for Typeform, there’s an important lesson to take away here.
“The structure has to be in place first,” Eamonn advises, “know what your compensation philosophy is and why you want to introduce more transparency. Then try and anticipate what the reactions would be if you opened up your bands today. If it’s clear that lots of problems would come to the surface, fix those problems structurally first to ensure fair and consistent decisions are in place, before going any further.”
"We already had a structure in place that ensures consistency in our compensation decisions. If that isn’t the case, I’d recommend starting there, before introducing transparency.”
Head of Reward at Typeform
For Eamonn, employee communication was the most important part of the entire project.
“I knew that I needed to bring our team along on the journey with me,” Eamonn says, “sharing the process every step of the way.”
Before the project even began, employees were briefed on why the company planned to introduce transparent salary bands, including how they were responding to employee feedback from previous engagement surveys.
From there, Eamonn regularly shared updates on how his team were approaching the project and what the important milestones would be.
“We used key moments without our Rewards cycle as touchpoints to update employees on the project,” Eamonn explains, “as well as to keep building the team’s general understanding of compensation concepts and the logic behind our approach.”
"Bring employees along the journey with you. Don’t just share the final destination, share how you’re getting there.”
Head of Reward at Typeform
“This was absolutely crucial to a successful rollout. I knew that if we did a one-off announcement right at the end of the process, there would be a lot of questions and confusion, which is the opposite outcome to what we were aiming for.”
Once the team was ready to roll out the transparent pay bands to the wider team, Eamonn first ran two enablement sessions with line managers to ensure they had a clear understanding of how Rewards worked at Typeform and how transparent bands were fitting into that.
“Communicating compensation is never just about the Rewards team,” Eamonn says, “it’s often the managers who are having conversations with their direct reports about pay and progression, so my priority was to make sure our line managers were well-informed.”
From there, the salary bands were published on an internal portal which enables employees to view the ranges within their own job family.
“Alongside the portal I also wanted to make sure there was clear documentation for employees to reference,” says Eamonn, “We put together a Notion page that has all the information about our compensation approach and all the FAQs that had come up. I also built a Google sheet widget so that employees could put their salary range in and easily calculate their position within that range.”
The whole company was briefed on the final result, with the foundation of understanding about compensation and the transparency project meaning that the feedback from employees was only positive.
We know how important it is to connect with others in the Rewards space for advice and inspiration.
So, throughout 2025 Vaso Parisinou, Chief People Officer at Ravio, is hosting discussions with Reward Leaders about their compensation approach or a tricky topic within the Rewards space.
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