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The European directive on pay transparency has been postponed, but the issue remains unresolved. What was previously implicit will now have to be made explicit, and organizations that use this delay to prepare will have a head start.
This is because pay transparency will primarily spark numerous conversations between employees and managers about compensation—discussions for which many managers are currently unprepared. The delay simply allows a little more time to prepare for this properly. At an HR Morning event organized by NUMA, three HR leaders from Doctolib, VINCI Construction, and Alma shared their on-the-ground insights on this topic. Here’s what they’ve implemented, and why the regulatory deadline does nothing to alleviate the operational urgency.
Pay transparency is often discussed as a legal and HR issue. In reality, its most profound impact lies elsewhere: in the relationship between a manager and their employees.
As soon as salary bands are made available, questions about job classifications, pay gaps, and promotion criteria will no longer be handled exclusively by HR. They will come directly to managers on a daily basis, often without warning. These conversations won’t be new, but they will become more frequent, more direct, and much harder to avoid.
A manager who cannot explain a pay gap cannot keep passing the buck to HR indefinitely. It is this shift in attitude—more than the directive itself—that redefines what is expected of a manager today.
This is the key insight shared by companies that have taken on this challenge: pay gaps aren't the problem. The inability to explain them is.
At Doctolib, rapid growth has led—as is often the case with scale-ups—to situations where two employees in the same role may have slightly different compensation levels. Tristan Blasselle, Director of Compensation & Benefits, established a clear principle from the outset: the goal—a realistic one—is not to have a perfect system, nor to smooth everything out immediately. It isto have a system that every manager can explain and defend.
In practical terms, this involved two parallel initiatives: establishing salary bands that employees could easily understand, and conducting in-depth training to ensure that every manager understood what it means to be placed at a specific point within a band, what justifies that placement, and how to explain it clearly without having to improvise. Without this second initiative, the first one does not provide clarity; instead, it raises unanswered questions.
Transparency does not require perfection. It requires consistency. VINCI Construction and Alma have made different choices in this regard, based on their respective corporate cultures and the diversity of their business lines. The decisions each company made—and the reasons behind them—can be found in the event report.
On this point, the three companies are in agreement: you never start with communication. You start with the foundation.
At VINCI Construction, Victor Ribeiro, Head of Human Resources, puts it simply: before broaching the subject more broadly, we need to map out the actual gaps, identifying which ones are explainable and which ones pose a problem. In a group with dozens of very different business lines and sectors, even the slightest gray area immediately becomes a source of tension.
This preliminary work focuses on three specific questions:
Without clear answers to these questions, publishing salary ranges doesn't provide clarity. It mostly just creates confusion.
Transparency leaves no room for vagueness. This is often where organizations underestimate the scope of the task. At Alma, this work even preceded any discussion of pay scales: the role and level structure was established first, alongside the definition of their “salary principles” that guide their decisions. The rest followed. The role and level structure was established first, alongside the definition of their “salary principles”
Simply providing managers with salary ranges isn’t enough. What they need are clear guidelines to help them handle the conversation fairly when the time comes.
At Alma, Vincent Cano emphasizes a point that is often overlooked: employees frequently perceive their salary as a personal judgment rather than an organizational decision. Without a shared framework, the conversation quickly becomes emotional, and the manager finds themselves at a loss.
To support them, Alma has implemented several initiatives:
What this distinction prevents: treating situations that are not uniform as if they were, and undermining trust through excessive simplification. Doctolib and VINCI Construction have each developed complementary systems to embed these benchmarks into day-to-day management practices.
It’s often the last thing to be addressed in deployment plans. And yet, if it’s not in place, it’s the one that brings everything else down.
At Doctolib, alignment has been designed as a distinct step in its own right, with a specific sequence:
Only after all these stakeholders have been consulted and brought on board is the communication extended to all company employees. This is done to address a very real risk: conflicting messages between what a manager says and what the HR department says create more mistrust than a lack of transparency.
Another principle widely agreed upon at the event: don’t make too much of a fuss about the announcement. Pay transparency isn’t a product launch. It’s a cultural transformation that takes time to take root. Alma structured its own alignment process starting with the CEO, paying particular attention to the most sensitive decisions—those that can cause friction if not properly anticipated. Learn more about this complementary approach in the event report.
Doctolib, VINCI Construction, and Alma operate in radically different environments. A tech scale-up, a major industrial group, and a growing fintech company. Yet their approaches converge on the essentials.
None of them waited for the directive to get started. None of them advocate for total transparency out of some abstract conviction. All of them began by establishing a framework before opening up the discussions. And all of them made managers the central pillar of the perception of fairness within their organizations.
What these companies have gone through, you will likely go through as well. They’ve agreed to share in detail what worked and what was more challenging. All of their insights are available for free.
The European directive on pay transparency has been postponed, but the issue remains unresolved. What was previously implicit will now have to be made explicit, and organizations that use this delay to prepare will have a head start.
This is because pay transparency will primarily spark numerous conversations between employees and managers about compensation—discussions for which many managers are currently unprepared. The delay simply allows a little more time to prepare for this properly. At an HR Morning event organized by NUMA, three HR leaders from Doctolib, VINCI Construction, and Alma shared their on-the-ground insights on this topic. Here’s what they’ve implemented, and why the regulatory deadline does nothing to alleviate the operational urgency.
Pay transparency is often discussed as a legal and HR issue. In reality, its most profound impact lies elsewhere: in the relationship between a manager and their employees.
As soon as salary bands are made available, questions about job classifications, pay gaps, and promotion criteria will no longer be handled exclusively by HR. They will come directly to managers on a daily basis, often without warning. These conversations won’t be new, but they will become more frequent, more direct, and much harder to avoid.
A manager who cannot explain a pay gap cannot keep passing the buck to HR indefinitely. It is this shift in attitude—more than the directive itself—that redefines what is expected of a manager today.
This is the key insight shared by companies that have taken on this challenge: pay gaps aren't the problem. The inability to explain them is.
At Doctolib, rapid growth has led—as is often the case with scale-ups—to situations where two employees in the same role may have slightly different compensation levels. Tristan Blasselle, Director of Compensation & Benefits, established a clear principle from the outset: the goal—a realistic one—is not to have a perfect system, nor to smooth everything out immediately. It isto have a system that every manager can explain and defend.
In practical terms, this involved two parallel initiatives: establishing salary bands that employees could easily understand, and conducting in-depth training to ensure that every manager understood what it means to be placed at a specific point within a band, what justifies that placement, and how to explain it clearly without having to improvise. Without this second initiative, the first one does not provide clarity; instead, it raises unanswered questions.
Transparency does not require perfection. It requires consistency. VINCI Construction and Alma have made different choices in this regard, based on their respective corporate cultures and the diversity of their business lines. The decisions each company made—and the reasons behind them—can be found in the event report.
On this point, the three companies are in agreement: you never start with communication. You start with the foundation.
At VINCI Construction, Victor Ribeiro, Head of Human Resources, puts it simply: before broaching the subject more broadly, we need to map out the actual gaps, identifying which ones are explainable and which ones pose a problem. In a group with dozens of very different business lines and sectors, even the slightest gray area immediately becomes a source of tension.
This preliminary work focuses on three specific questions:
Without clear answers to these questions, publishing salary ranges doesn't provide clarity. It mostly just creates confusion.
Transparency leaves no room for vagueness. This is often where organizations underestimate the scope of the task. At Alma, this work even preceded any discussion of pay scales: the role and level structure was established first, alongside the definition of their “salary principles” that guide their decisions. The rest followed. The role and level structure was established first, alongside the definition of their “salary principles”
Simply providing managers with salary ranges isn’t enough. What they need are clear guidelines to help them handle the conversation fairly when the time comes.
At Alma, Vincent Cano emphasizes a point that is often overlooked: employees frequently perceive their salary as a personal judgment rather than an organizational decision. Without a shared framework, the conversation quickly becomes emotional, and the manager finds themselves at a loss.
To support them, Alma has implemented several initiatives:
What this distinction prevents: treating situations that are not uniform as if they were, and undermining trust through excessive simplification. Doctolib and VINCI Construction have each developed complementary systems to embed these benchmarks into day-to-day management practices.
It’s often the last thing to be addressed in deployment plans. And yet, if it’s not in place, it’s the one that brings everything else down.
At Doctolib, alignment has been designed as a distinct step in its own right, with a specific sequence:
Only after all these stakeholders have been consulted and brought on board is the communication extended to all company employees. This is done to address a very real risk: conflicting messages between what a manager says and what the HR department says create more mistrust than a lack of transparency.
Another principle widely agreed upon at the event: don’t make too much of a fuss about the announcement. Pay transparency isn’t a product launch. It’s a cultural transformation that takes time to take root. Alma structured its own alignment process starting with the CEO, paying particular attention to the most sensitive decisions—those that can cause friction if not properly anticipated. Learn more about this complementary approach in the event report.
Doctolib, VINCI Construction, and Alma operate in radically different environments. A tech scale-up, a major industrial group, and a growing fintech company. Yet their approaches converge on the essentials.
None of them waited for the directive to get started. None of them advocate for total transparency out of some abstract conviction. All of them began by establishing a framework before opening up the discussions. And all of them made managers the central pillar of the perception of fairness within their organizations.
What these companies have gone through, you will likely go through as well. They’ve agreed to share in detail what worked and what was more challenging. All of their insights are available for free.
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