Summer reviews are coming, and your managers are about to improvise. We need to fix that asap!
Fix your foundation first:
Your employees may think your pay system is made up…
Let me paint you a picture to show you what I mean, because I KNOW you’ve seen this movie before:
A high performer who knows they crushed it this year sits down with their manager for The Talk.
They’ve been practicing what they’re going to say in the shower for like, three weeks. They’re ready. Is it a new title? A comp bump? Both?? (An employee can dream.)
The manager walks in with good intentions and roughly zero useful information, and delivers something along the lines of:
“I think you’re doing great. I’m really going to advocate for you.”
Aaaand… that’s it. That’s the whole answer. 😐
Nothing but good vibes and a vague promise of “advocacy” from someone who, let’s be honest, doesn’t fully understand how decisions get made above them either.
The employee leaves frustrated. The manager leaves feeling like they NAILED it. Yeah right.
And then BAM six months later HR is doing an exit interview and the employee brings up that specific convo.
A lot of managers fail at their jobs because their org never gave them the infrastructure or support to do it well. We both know it!! We keep handing managers the keys and going “figure it out!” and then acting shocked when everything goes sideways.
📢 That infrastructure has a name, and it’s job architecture.
I recently wrote about the foundations of job architecture in a piece with Salary.com, and TBH I wasn’t done talking about it.
So here we are, going deeper, getting granular, and digging into why your pay foundation is the REAL problem here.
Allow me to convince you why building one is worth your time. 💰
The Structural Breakdown Behind Every Bad Pay Conversation
The data doesn’t lie, according to Salary’s 2026 State of Pay Practices Report, nearly 75% of HR folks believe employees are paid fairly.
The crazy part is that only 44% think employees actually feel that way.
Wooooof.
That’s an undeniable 31-point gap between what HR believes is reality and what they believe employees are experiencing!!
Now, before anyone says “we just need to communicate better,” I want to be really clear that this is more of a structural issue than just a simple messaging tweak.
You can write the most thoughtful total compensation statement ever produced and train your managers on talking points until you’re out of budget, but if the underlying framework doesn’t exist, I promise you that none of it will land the way you want it to.
More than anything, employees often get confused about the logic behind certain decisions, so if there isn’t one they can see or follow at all, no amount of communication is going to paper over that.
As somebody who needs to know the WHY behind any policy decision, I feel this deeply.
Guess what else makes that 31-point gap even harder to ignore???
Only HALF of orgs currently have a formal job architecture in place! 🤯
That means the other half are making pay decisions that affect people’s livelihoods without any documented framework underneath them.
And 18% say they have no plans to build one…ever.
To put it in safe-for-work terms…that is absolutely bonkers to me.
What Happens When Review Season Hits a Broken Foundation?
Summer review cycles have a way of surfacing convos that orgs have been conveniently avoiding for months and months!
Employees want to know what growth looks like and whether the number they’re about to receive accurately reflects the work they did.
These are completely reasonable things to want answers to, and managers without a job architecture to reference are left improvising responses to questions that deserve real ones.
That might work for an SNL skit, but not with performance reviews.
The convo falls apart the moment an employee has to go find HR just to understand what’s happening, even though the manager is the one holding the bag when issues start to surface.
Once again, the source of these types of situations stems from a shaky or nonexistent foundation!
Salary’s research found a significant manager training gap sitting underneath all of this.
Pay convos are being left largely to chance, then handed off to people who haven’t been equipped to have them with any real consistency. 😲
When managers wing it, what you get is a patchwork of answers that contradict each other across teams, and that erodes trust faster than any engagement survey can measure!
So what do you do about it, anyway?! Let’s find 3 places to start.
What Good Looks Like From Both Sides of the Table
✍🏽1. Define what levels mean in writing, across the whole org.
This sounds like a pretty basic ask. And it IS. Yet most orgs still haven’t done it which tells you everything you need to know about how we got here. 😬
For example, if “Senior” means something different in Engineering than it does in People Ops, what you actually have is a collection of title preferences held together by historical precedent and whoever negotiated hardest at offer time. What a tangled web we weave!
That’s how you end up with Senior Analysts in one function making less than Associates in another, with zero defensible explanation sitting anywhere in writing. And when someone eventually asks why?? Crickets. 🦗
Salary’s guide on building an effective job architecture walks through what this looks like across three key layers (job families, levels, and pay bands) and how to build something that holds up when you apply it to real roles.
Worth bookmarking before you start, because the sequencing matters! ☝️🤓
Here are the questions you need to get crystal clear on before you start writing anything down:
- What does “Senior” actually require in terms of skills, scope, and impact? (And no, “years of experience” is NOT a real answer.)
- What separates a Manager from a Director beyond headcount?
- What does an IC at the top of the ladder look like and does that path even exist at your org, or is “go manage people” the only way up?
- How does someone level up? Like, what specifically do they need to demonstrate?
- Are the criteria consistent across functions, or is Engineering playing by one rulebook while Marketing is playing by another?
- What’s the difference between “meeting expectations” at one level vs. “ready for the next level”? Because those are NOT the same thing, and confusing them is how you end up promoting people too early and leaving high performers stuck for too long.
- Who actually owns this document once it exists, and how often does it get revisited? (Because a job architecture you wrote in 2021 and never touched again is basically a fossil at this point.)
Write the answers down. Align them across functions. And suddenly?? That document becomes the holy grail managers can point to when an employee asks what growth looks like. 🙌
Because right now, way too many of those conversations are pure theater. Employees know it. You know it. And your managers probably do as well…
✅ 2. Give managers a framework they can rely on.
A lot of orgs try to solve the manager training gap with a deck of talking points. LOL.
Those points might include what to say if someone asks about raises, and how to redirect if things get uncomfortable.
But then all of a sudden, everyone acts surprised when an employee asks something slightly off-script and the whole thing unravels! 🤷♀️
What managers actually need is an understanding of the logic.
For example, a clear view of how pay bands are structured, what factors inform where someone sits within a band, and what the realistic criteria look like for a promotion conversation.
When managers understand the reasoning behind the system, they can give real answers that make sense to each individual, instead of an optimistic word salad of deflections.
It also protects them, because when a framework exists, the answer isn’t just written off as being the manager’s opinion.
Now, it’s the documented standard, and that’s a very different convo to be in!
This is where skills-based job architecture becomes extremely useful.
Tying pay and progression to defined skills and competencies gives managers something concrete to reference.
Tenure or gut feel just feels like gambling…and honestly, I’d rather just go to a casino if I’m about to be doing all that. (And I don’t gamble.)
“Here’s what we’d need to see from you to support a promotion conversation” is a much more actionable sentence than “I really believe in you.”
One of those is a path forward, and the other is a placeholder.
🔁 3. Stop treating job architecture as a project with an end date.
I’d say this is where orgs that actually build a framework often still get it wrong!
What happens is that they do all the work, and then let the whole thing go stale for two years while the org scales around it.
Eventually, new roles get added on instinct, and titles get handed out as retention tools.
A reorg scrambles everything, and the documentation is sitting somewhere being neglected, with no updates in sight.
And then you’re back at square one, except now you have employees who believed the system existed and discovered it didn’t actually apply to them, which is its own special kind of trust erosion! 🫠
Salary has a webinar on fair pay through job architecture that covers this maintenance piece specifically, if that’s where you have found yourself.
It covers how to build something that functions as living infrastructure instead of a one-time deliverable.
I think the practical version of this is an annual review cadence and a clear process for adding new roles that doesn’t bypass the framework just because moving faster is easier.
Job architecture only works if you treat it like the living, breathing system it is!
Here’s the Data Backing All of This Up
👀Most HR and comp leaders already know their pay structure has gaps.
That’s because they’ve seen it in review conversations that went sideways or in the comp decisions that get made in isolation.
Unfortunately, many of those same leaders don’t have the data or the language to make the case internally, especially to the skeptical VP who has decided that job architecture is an HR hobby project and not a business priority. BOOOO.
That’s exactly the gap that Salary’s 2026 State of Pay Practices Report is here to close!
Based on responses from 525 orgs across 13 industries, it maps out where the breakdown between HR confidence and employee experience is happening, and why simply communicating better is more of a delay than a fix.
The report also lays out a sequenced path forward that puts foundation work first and communication second, which I believe is the only order that makes sense.
So if you’re heading into summer reviews with a framework that isn’t fully built yet, or you’re trying to make the case to leadership that this work is urgent, download the report and bring the data to the table.
Let it do some of the heavy lifting, because that’s what it’s there for!
