Employers may lack the structure to help employees make sense of their pay — and it can color how workers view the fairness of their compensation, according to a report released Tuesday by Salary.com.
While nearly 75% of HR professionals surveyed said they believe the workers at their organizations are paid fairly, only 44% said they believe workers share that view.
“That 31-point ‘confidence gap’ is the organizing insight of the report and reflects not a failure of effort, but a lack of structural foundation and communication,” Salary.com said in its release on the report.
That structural foundation can include aspects such as a formal job architecture, which only about 51% of employers say they have, or job leveling, which 22% of organizations still do not use, Salary.com said. Notably, only 46% of organizations provide a total reward statement to their workers, which includes the value of benefits, retirement contributions, paid time off and other compensation elements.
Additionally, managers are often expected to lead pay conversations — but only about 52% of organizations surveyed provide any formal training on conducting pay discussions. Just over 1 in 5 organizations also relied “mostly or entirely on manager discretion for pay decisions,” which can exacerbate feelings of unfairness, Salary.com said.
“The organizations that struggle most with employee trust in pay are often not the ones with bad intentions. They’re the ones that haven’t yet built the foundation that would make a good explanation possible,” said Amy Dwyer, CHRO at Salary.com. “You can’t communicate what you haven’t built. When job architecture is missing or job leveling is inconsistent, transparency can become noise instead of clarity.”
The broader culture in combination with regulatory action has pushed employers toward pay transparency, WTW survey results released August 2025 said. But as of last summer , many employers did not feel ready for that regulatory shift, an Aon plc report indicated.
Employee misperception of pay fairness can also disrupt engagement, a Payscale report from June 2025 said. More than two-thirds of employees surveyed said they felt they were underpaid, even when their compensation was considered at or above fair market rate — pointing to the need for improved compensation communication, Payscale said.