110: Key trends from the 2025 Compensation Best Practices Report

[00:00:00] Join us on a journey where we unravel the latest trends, tackle your burning questions and explore innovative strategies that are shaping the future of compensation, all with a coffee in hand. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Comp and Coffee, where we're here to serve up fresh insights on all things compensation, HR and rewards.

[00:00:23] I'm your host Ruth Thomas and today we're diving into the latest insights from our newly released Compensation Best Practice Report. And I am delighted to have Amy Stewart, Sarah Hillemeyer and Lulee Cycli with me. So grab your favourite mug, settle in and let's get started. So welcome back Amy, Lulu and Sarah, you've all been on the podcast before. Thank you for giving your time to come back. We're going to spend a bit of time thinking about what we learnt through this year's Compensation Best Practice Report,

[00:00:52] particularly from the lens of the specialisms that you normally look at the report from. So very happy to have you here to join me in discussion. I know you've all been on the podcast, as I said, but let's do some quick intros. So would you like to tell the audience who you are, what your role is here at Payscale and maybe where you're located? As we're all fully remote, people like to know where you're dialing in from. So Sarah, do you want to kick us off? Sure. Good morning. Thanks for having me back, Ruth. I'm Dr. Sarah Hillemeyer.

[00:01:20] I've been building AI enabled tools in HR tech, healthcare and other industries for more than 15 years. At Payscale, I lead our AI and data insights teams within our R&D division. I am in sunny Seattle this morning. I think it's going to pour later, but I've stoking it up this morning with my coffee and my besties here on the podcast. Amy. Over to you. You're not too far away from Sarah. No, I'm not.

[00:01:49] I'm also in the Seattle area and I'm going to glance outside to see if it was sunny here because I don't think I'm having that same experience. So I have to wait and see whether I'm going to get the sun or the pouring that Sarah mentioned. But my name is Amy Stewart and I'm the principal of research and insights here at Payscale. And I'm delighted to talk about our compensation best practices report as part of this podcast. And Lulu. Hi, everyone. Good morning. I'm Lulu Cycli.

[00:02:17] I am Payscale Senior Corporate Employment Counsel. Aside from all of the in-house advice and counsel I give to our people team, I track very closely all things legislation related to compensation, more particularly paid transparency laws. I am in always, sometimes sunny Dallas, Texas, although it's been very warm here and we're getting a lot of spring storms. We had like golf ball size hail this weekend.

[00:02:44] So tis the season for lots of storms here in Dallas, but great to be here. Thank you. Well, I'm going to be there in two weeks time. What's the weather going to be like in two weeks time in Dallas? It could be 20 degrees. It could be 110 degrees. I mean, it's a toss up. April is a toss up here. Right. I think I need to connect beforehand then before I leave London and head out your way. So, okay.

[00:03:13] So compensation best practice report was released on March the 12th. If I remember rightly, Amy, it's our annual flagship survey. Do you want to introduce the audience if they're new to this report? What's it about? Why do we do it? And maybe some of the key headlines from this year's study. Yeah. So the compensation best practices report is a annual report that we have been doing now for 16 years.

[00:03:39] It distills data and insights from the largest known survey that we're aware of focused on compensation management best practices. We gathered 3,595 responses in the fielding time period between November and December of 2024. Put the report together in January and February and we release it this year in mid-March, like Ruth just said. This year we're labeling the report like a soft subtitle as the year of contention.

[00:04:09] And this is a year in which the labor market and demands for fair pay really could heat up amidst a deepening political divide and growing awareness of wealth inequality. Both total and average voluntary turnover decreased substantially this year, which I'm sorry, compared to last year, which we call the year of retention.

[00:04:30] So we're in a labor market where employers have a lot of power, but where there is a lot of demand and sense of instability in the employee workforce. When it comes to pay increases, we are expecting those to continue to drop down to what used to be a normal 3% average before the COVID-19 pandemic. We are seeing them drop from 3.8% to 3.5% this year. And I think that that has held true.

[00:04:58] We will find out when we field our salary budget survey whether or not that was what people actually gave. So stay tuned for that if you are somebody who wants a mid-year check in on how pay increases worked across the board and also what folks are planning for 2025, especially as the economy is in a precarious position as of right now.

[00:05:21] We also see that 47% of orgs say that they're experiencing tension between ensuring fair pay and optimizing spend, which is a healthy chunk of organizations that we like to keep taps on in a precarious labor economy because it means they're trying to balance that choice between making sure that everyone is fairly paid and they're competitive in the talent market,

[00:05:44] but that they're not overspending and overcommitting their budget to a growth arc that the economy may not be able to support. So that's what we are seeing happen right now leading into 2025 as we kind of close out this first quarter. Yeah, it was that last figure for me, that 47% of orgs, as you said, experiencing increased tension between ensuring fair pay, where we know employees have very high expectations for that, and optimizing spend.

[00:06:11] And I think that's going to continue to be a challenge as we pivot through the year. That was really why we came up with this theme of the year of contention and increased friction between employers and employees. Okay, so looking at the report overall and comparing its previous years, what were some of the biggest trends you were seeing or any surprises in the data this year? I don't know, Lulu, do you want to start us from the lens that you look at the report? What was surprising for you in this year's report?

[00:06:39] So not surprising is that I looked at the report through the lens of pay transparency, but what was surprising were a couple things that came out of it. So I think the first one that really surprised me was that even though we have more states adopting pay transparency laws, we actually saw that number shrink in terms of percentage of organizations who are sharing their ranges and job postings. So in 2024, we saw 60% of organizations share their ranges and job postings.

[00:07:05] And then the most recent CBPR report that retracted about 4% to 56%. Not so surprising is that, this is my opinion here, but likely due to pay transparency laws, we actually saw that the number of employees this year are asking more questions about their pay. Now, this could be as a result of pay transparency laws. This could be as a result of social media influence. This could be a result of Gen Z being really outwardly spoken about their pay.

[00:07:35] But last year it was 27%, and this year we saw it tick up to 32%. And we're actually also seeing that employees are expressing more appreciation for their organization's transparent approach to pay. This was a bigger jump than I expected. Last year it was only 14% of employees who said that. Now it's 21%. When Ruth and I are on webinars and things like that, and we get questions about, like, we can't get leadership buy-in to do pay transparency.

[00:08:03] Like, we live in a state that doesn't require it, but the leaders won't do it. That's a really good statistic, is that if you have employees who are more appreciative about the transparency organization is about their pay, they're probably going to be more likely to stay. And you're going to see your attrition rates go down. You're going to see a better quality of candidates applying to your roles. And then the other thing that I thought was very interesting, which we actually had a couple sessions on with our conference session last fall,

[00:08:31] the fall of 2024, is that we're seeing more organizations training managers on how to have pay conversations with their employees. This to me is huge. This went up eight points, eight percentage points. So last year it was 51%. This year it's up to almost 60%. And I think that that's really important because I think now what we're seeing is that managers are now going to have to be part of the conversation

[00:08:55] as opposed to punting off any questions or hard questions back to HR, back to comp pros or anybody else. So I'm glad that we're seeing that number to down. So continuing demand for pay transparency coming from employees. And then I know HR folks, you know, wanting to put more pay transparent processes in place. Sarah, from the lens that you look at the report, was there anything that you saw there that was an interesting trend or surprising?

[00:09:24] Sure. Sure. The lens with which I examine these reports is usually from the technology and AI perspective. This year we saw that the use of compensation technology is up from last year. About a third of organizations that we surveyed use purpose-built compensation technology like Payscale.

[00:09:43] That's a 5% jump from 2024, which to my statistical eyes is significant and indicates this growing importance of leveraging modern tech to have increased confidence in these pay decisions and make sure that for companies to make sure that they're strategically spending their labor budget and allocating that in the way that works best for their company. Yeah, good news obviously for us at Payscale to see that trend increasing.

[00:10:11] We're going to talk a little bit more about AI later and maybe that's the reason we're seeing an increase in that trend, but let's save that nugget for a bit later on. I think for me, the thing that was not a surprise in this year's report was that compensation reigned at the top of the most challenging HR activities again this year. So it got to the top for the first time last year, beating retention recruitment. And I can't remember what the third one was. It normally sits behind Amy.

[00:10:40] Which one was it, sorry? Engagement. Engagement, yes. Retention recruitment engagement. So comp hit the top last year and it stayed there. I think for many of the reasons that you've just been talking about, Lulu. One thing we did see was a slight drop off in the number of organizations committing to undertake pay equity proactively, pay equity analysis. So that was 57% this year.

[00:11:07] That was down 5% from last year. But if we look at the trend overall, it's still up 19% from 2020. So really, you know, 2020 was the period where we saw social movements happening and the COVID pandemic crisis highlighting pay disparities. And that was when new legislation started to emerge. So that was when there was a lot of focus on doing pay equity. So the trend is up from 2020, but we saw a slight drop off from last year.

[00:11:38] Is that anything, Amy, to do with the increased coverage of D&I pullbacks? And what did we see in our survey around that? Yeah, so we did ask some specific questions around D&I in the November, December timeframe when the survey was fielded. They're noting that that is before all the executive orders that have kind of turned that over, turned that wagon over for a lot of organizations. I'm trying to figure out how they're going to show up this year, given those various legislative changes.

[00:12:08] But what we are seeing is that at least prior to those executive orders, organizations by and large were not looking to pull back on D&I. We saw that only 11 percent, which is, you know, a small minority, said that they were planning to pull back on D&I initiatives. 28 percent are planning to increase investment. So we don't know how the executive orders have changed that yet.

[00:12:35] Those will be really interesting questions to ask in 2026 going into our our 2026 compensation best practices survey. But we do know that pay equity is still something that organizations think is really important. And we see that in that 57 percent number, which is a strong majority of organizations saying they have a planned or current initiative for pay equity analysis that hit a high of 66 percent in 2020.

[00:13:02] And it is still up there, you know, substantially increase of not like 38 percent prior to the Great Reservation. So that is becoming something that organizations say or believe is a central pillar to their comp strategy and to their talent strategy. Yeah. It's interesting, Lulu. We're seeing this pullback from D&I, but an increasing number of states proposing new legislation and the pay transparency bandwagon continuing to roll.

[00:13:29] And how do you view that? And, you know, how how can organizations navigate around that and making sure that they get to continue their pay transparency journey? Well, so at the end of last year, we put out our predictions for what 2025 would bring, knowing what this new federal administration was going to look like.

[00:13:47] And one of the predictions I put forth was that while we may not see a pay transparency law on the federal level, that states were going to take it into their own hands to pass pay transparency law, similar to what we've seen with the minimum wage. We haven't seen any movement on the federal level from the minimum wage increases, but we've seen, you know, down to municipalities taking it into their own hands to pass these type of laws. So, you know, like like I mentioned earlier at the top and Ruth, you mentioned it, too.

[00:14:14] We did see that 72 percent of HR professionals actually want to share pay ranges compared to the 52 percent who do regardless of whether their state requires it or not. So to me, this is this is a good sign, not ideal, but still a very good sign that there is this desire to want to share pay ranges because whether HR professionals understand the importance from the employee perspective of how to do it, the importance of retention and attracting new talent.

[00:14:42] But again, we are kind of seeing this conflict a little bit, whether it's a it's a policy conflict, a cultural conflict, conflict from leadership of not wanting to do it or some sort of resistance and wanting to share those ranges. And like I mentioned before, you know, 56, we are still seeing over half of companies are still sharing their pay ranges in their jobs, regardless of whether it's required by law or not. But something else to consider is that we also don't know whether these are fair and accurate ranges either.

[00:15:12] So it's really up to the states and to the candidates to really hold some of these organizations accountable if the pay ranges are not good faith ranges or reasonable ranges or, you know, whatever the individual law requires. But, you know, on the other hand, I think the largest impact of pay transparency legislation on employers is that organizations are communicating more about compensation practices. They're being more open. They're being more transparent to their employee population.

[00:15:39] In CBPR, we saw that it was 31 percent of organizations who are doing this. And then we're seeing, you know, that's being followed by a higher investment in compensation data. So we saw an uptick in that number up to 24 percent and then changing compensation strategies or structures at 22 percent. I mean, if we looked at this report two years ago, those numbers would be nowhere in the 20s at all. So the fact that we're seeing a positive trend towards this direction is is really, really, really encouraging. Yeah.

[00:16:09] Lulu, you mentioned earlier that there's an uptick in training managers on having those pay communication conversations, too. We're at almost 60 percent of companies polled that are really trading those managers to have specific, clear conversations with their reports about how they're paid, why they're paid, what they're paid, how they can increase their pay. Is that part of this pay transparency conversation?

[00:16:35] Or is it do we think of it as a separate thrust that's happening more internally? I think it should be part of the pay transparency conversation. There are organizations who see them as two different kind of arms in their in their structures and their philosophy. But to me, it's like it's got to be together. You know, you've got it. You've got to put it together. If you're going to be transparent about pay, whether you're required to or not, you're going to get questions about it.

[00:17:01] And the best way to field questions is to train those managers to have those important conversations. That way, you as a comp professional or an HR professional aren't spending all of your time fielding questions from potentially thousands of employees who want to understand, well, what data set did you use? Did you just throw a dart at the board to figure out what my salary looks like? Did you use AI to figure out what my salary looks like? So I think having those conversations and really empowering those managers, which at the same time should empower those managers to understand how they're being paid as well.

[00:17:31] To me, it's like it's a no brainer to have to increase those to empower those managers to have those compensation conversations and not just throw it back on HR to do it. Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, transparency breeds transparency, doesn't it?

[00:17:47] And, you know, it's not only in terms of the laws requiring pay ranges to be posted in job advertisements, but, you know, organizations sharing transparency pay ranges so that that's not a shock when employees see that. And it even extends, Sarah, to how we start to think more about data and how we are able to explain to the people that use our data about how we derive it. I think that's becoming more important as well, isn't it?

[00:18:18] Absolutely. The demand for compensation data to be transparent in terms of where it's coming from, what the biases in the underlying data set are, how anything is modeled or filled in has definitely increased over the three years that I've been working in this domain. It's almost getting to the point like finance, where a credit score has to be really transparent in terms of what features it uses and how it's calculated.

[00:18:43] I feel like we're going in that direction, that the data sources and the scores and how you determine someone's pay based on that data. There's a real demand for transparency in those calculations and sources. And one thing that's coming in is obviously AI. We can't probably do a podcast without talking about AI. That's going to have its own challenges around transparency, explaining, you know, how AI is being integrated into the products.

[00:19:11] But, you know, AI is definitely increasing in usage in terms of use cases. And we asked quite a few questions about AI in the study this year. So what did you notice there, Sarah, in terms of some key observations? Sure, sure. So 2023 was the year that generative AI exploded. ChatGPT, GPT-4, those models came out. In 2024, we saw the use of AI in HR go mainstream.

[00:19:38] This year, according to our survey, employers are increasingly recognizing the need to balance that technology adoption for efficiency with adapting their compensation strategies to remain competitive in this really weird evolving labor market. Overall, HR professionals are embracing AI, particularly for tasks like compensation management, job description creation. So AI adoption is growing.

[00:20:06] We did also ask companies if they were going to replace their labor force with AI. And we didn't see much of that, especially in the HR sector. There's still a lot of value on balancing that tooling with the people aspect and then the more traditionally structured compensation tools that they are using.

[00:20:28] As one example of that, our analysis found that 47% of organizations are using AI to help write their job descriptions. If you've never done this, give it a shot. Type it into ChatGPTs. They write me a job description for a comp analyst. You get a really good starting point. But those organizations that have more mature strategies are using that generative AI alongside a more traditional job description management tool.

[00:20:56] In addition, almost 70% of companies are open to using AI to monitor pay equity and compliance. And those who are using it are integrating it alongside those existing tools rather than fully replacing them. So it's clear to me, and looking at the trends year over year, that companies are increasingly using AI to supercharge their existing HR and compensation teams with that real-time data, intelligent insights, and improved workflows.

[00:21:25] But we haven't seen it really change the work of what those HR teams are doing yet or shift the labor that's required on HR teams. It's just making the existing processes better and more robust and more scalable. I would say that was a great... Oh, sorry, Lili. Go ahead. I was going to just tag on really quickly. That, to me, was really eye-opening because I know when AI first came out, everyone was freaking out. Like, is this going to take my job? Is this going to take my job?

[00:21:55] And when I've had conversations with Sarah about it and with some other SMEs about AI, from an employment law perspective, to me, it was always like, well, AI can still make mistakes. It's not perfect. You still need the human eyes to, like, double-check and make sure there's no discrimination. So I'm really happy that HR professionals are not, like, completely just replacing humans with AI because there still needs to be that double-check because AI can discriminate.

[00:22:23] The EEOC, at least at one point in time, said that they were going to hold organizations accountable if AI was discriminating against applicants or whatever. Insta or whatever. So I'm happy to see that. They hold the employee organization accountable, not the tool-making organization accountable. Not the tool-making. Yeah, the organization that uses the tool. Yep. Wait till we get to the point where government agencies sues a computer. We may see that in our lifetime.

[00:22:52] Yeah, I mean, Amy, anything you wanted to add on because you kind of added all those new AI questions in this year into the study? Well, just for context for everyone. So last year when AI was still new to HR organizations, we asked the question about what is your, you know, what describes your sentiment around AI generally?

[00:23:12] And this year we asked more specifically, describe your sentiment around AI for market pricing, for recommending pay increases, for legislative compliance, and for policy documentation. And what was interesting is that the numbers across all of those things are not exactly the same, but they're, like, roughly the same.

[00:23:31] So the percentage of people that are totally on board with using AI for all of those HR and comp-related tasks is about a fifth of organizations, at 20-ish percent. And then another 50% is cautiously optimistic. So combined, that's 75% of organizations are cautiously or totally on board with using AI for some of those functions.

[00:23:58] Again, with the caveat that employers are responsible for those biases that might be, you know, challenging, challenging for that situation. And then in the labor question, when we asked whether or not you are planning to replace workers, it's 52% that say no, and we don't plan to in the future. Another 20% that say no, but we are considering it in the future. In the future, it could be three months, it could be 30 years.

[00:24:28] And we have 18% that say we are doing this right now. Although 18% is a minority of organizations, that's a chunk. It aligns with that same percentage that's totally on board for using AI to do all of the things. So I do think that there is some anxiety that's legitimate among the job classes, and that hits every job.

[00:24:49] It's everything from, you know, your lowest wage labor jobs up through your CEOs being concerned that AI may take some aspects of jobs away from the market in some respects. We don't know at this time if that means that new jobs will replace those jobs. And if AI is just going to take away the stuff that we don't like to do, or it's going to do more harm or more damage to our employment economy.

[00:25:17] So I think that that is something that is concerning to a lot of people in the general public, as well as employers. And it is something to kind of keep note about within your organization. I think that your employees are probably concerned about it to some extent. I think our focus as we think about deploying AI here at Payscale at the moment is really just about augmenting the work that you do and making it easier to do. I mean, you know, I've been a comp analyst. I've been a comp manager.

[00:25:43] You know, I know how number crunching and spreadsheet bound you can be and anything that can make some of that work faster and some of that work more accurate so that I can maybe focus on more of the outcomes. That's what I would love AI to do for me. But while still using my judgment, my expertise as a compensation expert to kind of like curate the outcomes, make the best decisions on the information that's coming out of the process. I 100% agree.

[00:26:12] As a writer, I find AI to be more threatening in this info, in part because I think that the struggle of writing is what results in writing being good. And so when you take that away and have a robot do it that is just borrowing from other people's writing without infringement on copyright or acknowledge infringement on copyright, that does give me some anxiety. And I'm particularly concerned about junior level people.

[00:26:41] Like I'm in the upper echelons, you know, of my career path. But what I'm concerned about is, you know, a generation from now, are we going to have people that relied so heavily on AI to do basic things that they're not actually able to do them without that assist? And where does that, what is that, is that good or is that bad for kind of the future workforce that we are looking to employ a generation? Are y'all feeling those memes on the internet that are like, I graduated college without chat GPT?

[00:27:10] Like if you feel bad about yourself, remind yourself that you graduated college without chat GPT. And I was like, that is good. That is all for mantra. Put up on my wall if I ever feel sad one day. I've been thinking about this lately too. And I was reminded of learning math. Yeah.

[00:27:29] So we have this issue in our labor force now where, whether it's a comp analyst or a software engineer or a mathematician, we use the grunt work, get through it, do the calculations, rote part to train our labor to those more senior roles.

[00:27:48] So you spend a while sludging through spreadsheets and finding the right data or in the really olden days in comp, you're sludging through binders to find the right data and triangulate between them. And I think there's a real fear that we won't learn the skills that we need to be more senior if we don't have those more junior experiences.

[00:28:09] And that's certainly true in software engineering where AI isn't close to replacing our senior software engineers, but it is getting close on the junior side. But how do you get senior software engineers if you never need junior software engineers? In the same way. As I was thinking about that, I was thinking about calculators and the way that my 11-year-old is learning math and she has to learn long division and she has to go through this process.

[00:28:35] And as a professional mathematician in the world, I have not done long division in a very long time, right? Because I have tools at my disposal that helped me do that, but I did have to learn it, right?

[00:28:49] And so we still force that learning of basic arithmetic through our kids and through our developing math brains until they get to the point where they can do that higher level work and use the tools just for the easy stuff.

[00:29:08] So I'm hoping and I'm optimistic actually that AI in lots of places, not every single place will be that kind of tool that, sure, you still need to know how to do it. You still need to know how to write a for loop or a while loop or an if-else statement or how to look up data in a salary survey. AI isn't going to replace the need to know how to do that.

[00:29:31] But then once you're proficient in that skill, you shouldn't have to spend a ton of time repeating long division over and over and over again. You should have a tool that makes it easy to do. That's the same in law school. Your first year of law school, at least when I was in law school many, many years ago, your first year of law school when you had to do your research, like your first year research assignment, you could not use a laptop even to write it. You couldn't use a laptop to research. You had to go physically to the library.

[00:29:59] You had to write down like exactly what book you found, where you found the information, hand-dried everything. And like I couldn't imagine going to a library today to do research, right? I mean like, you know. Our listeners may not realize this. Lulu is not old. She was in law school when the internet was around. It was around on the internet. It was like 12 years ago, 13 years ago. Actually longer than that, 15 years ago when I started law school. But yeah, I mean, to me, I was frustrated at the time. I was like, we've got computers. Like what the heck?

[00:30:28] Like why can't we use technology at our disposal? It's exactly what Sarah said, which is like we have to have these skills and use these skills so that we don't become so reliant on technology because these are analytical skills. These are skills we use with our brain, not just like typing something into a computer and just getting spit out the results. And then even like from a lawyer perspective, like if I were to go to try GPT and I would say like give me case law about employment discrimination, like sometimes it's not right.

[00:30:58] Because AI is only as good as, you know, the engineers that put the information into the system, right? And how updated that is, et cetera. So that's a really good point, Sarah. Really, really good point. Yeah. It's going to be interesting, you know, redefining career journeys, particularly from the entry level.

[00:31:14] I mean, we, to some degree, remote work is also having an impact on that where, you know, your remote working organisations and more junior employees are not necessarily, you know, getting the same level of in-person mentoring and learning on the job that they might have done. So it's really kind of seems to suggest a rethink around how we think about entry level careers. Okay. So let's close out.

[00:31:37] Based on maybe information you saw in CBPR, I'm going to ask each of you, what do you think is the main thing that you would recommend our audience thought about in terms of things they should stay ahead of the curve on in 2025? Who's going to volunteer to go first? Sarah? Sure. Use data, use tech to ensure equity and to strategically place your labour dollars to achieve your business goals.

[00:32:07] I think HR teams should be working toward that north star of developing a data-driven compensation strategy and applying it consistently and efficiently. Data and tech can help you achieve that equitable pay structure, prevent or repair compression issues, and march towards pay transparency with confidence. Luter? Pay communications. I think that's going to be the next big thing.

[00:32:34] We're already seeing some states propose laws in this space already, very few, but still it's coming. And, you know, like we had already talked about earlier, the more transparent you're getting about pay as an organisation, the more questions you're going to be fielding. So might as well come ahead of that and start either pay communications with your managers or providing total reward sheets and showing, you know, your incumbent employees what their range looks like and where they fall on that range. I mean, we already are seeing an uptick in organisations doing this.

[00:33:04] Our CDPR show, 31% of organisations are already doing this. So we know that comp professionals are already acknowledging that this is important. But I think, you know, I would say probably in the next three to five years, it's going to be the next big pay transparency type wave. And Amy, from your perspective, what's the one thing that you would recommend? Hard to pick one thing. I would agree with Lulu that it kind of ends in the pay communications.

[00:33:31] Like that is where you actually see the results of your compensation strategy, the data and tech that you're using. We asked a question in CDPR about whether you are proactively adjusting pay for severely underpaid employees. And I think that that's a metric that I like to see go up every year. It's not just underpaid, it's severely underpaid employees. And we don't see 100% of organisations say that they do that.

[00:33:57] But I think that those are the stories that really have an impact on people's lives within your organisation. And a challenge that a lot of companies have is they're not communicative necessarily, like up, down and throughout the organisation about what their policy is when it comes to addressing unfair pay. So that in that case, you have your executive leadership having a different view of what is the critical, important thing than maybe some of your hiring managers.

[00:34:25] And you can get some static between, you know, individual hiring managers coming to you and saying, Hey, I have this one star employee that I'm really trying to keep in the compensation team having like a different list of priorities in terms of like who they're trying to adjust pay for. So I think getting really laser targeted on what fair pay means in your organisation and really, really eloquent about how you are communicating that both with executive leadership

[00:34:52] and your hiring managers and your employees and your employees and your employees so that you can do those proactive pay adjustments that really do impact people and build trust within your employees that HR has their back and is motivated to fairly pay everyone according to something consistent and standard. That does not require people to bring it up themselves with their manager to threaten to leave to negotiate.

[00:35:20] That is where I think you start to see the contention grow within your employee group. So being proactive about it is the thing that I would stress in 2025. Great. Well, thank you, Sarah, Lulu and Amy for your recommendations. Lots of nuggets we've revealed today in terms of the compensation best practice report. You can get access to that at payscale.com if you navigate to the research pages.

[00:35:45] It's the second most recent report that gender pay gap report is also released in March. Amy and I are going to be talking about that shortly on another episode of Comp and Coffee. We're also doing a webinar on April the 10th on the 2025 compensation best practice report. So our HR leaders are going to be talking about the insights that they found most telling in the report.

[00:36:10] So please help yourself to that report and get up to speed in terms of the key trends in compensation best practice this year. So thank you again, all three of you. And if you're listening in and you have any topics that you'd like us to talk about here at Comp and Coffee, then email us at coffee at payscale.com. And thanks for tuning in. And we look forward to seeing you for another hot take on all things compensation. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you.