Payscale (00:05.366)
Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of Comp and Coffee. Today we are going to be spending some time thinking about the content of our 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report. This is our annual research study that we do. This year we had over 3,500 respondents and we will be releasing the report later this month when Amy's going to introduce herself in a minute and I'll get her to confirm the exact date. But in all when we step back to look at the data from the research report

really our key takeaway was that we are seeing this as the year of strategic alignment. So compensation is being elevated to an executive level priority while budgets tighten, employee skepticism rises and leaders are being asked to prove the impact of pay decisions more often and more visibly. So I've invited some of our pay scale SMEs here today to talk about this with me. We're going to be focusing our conversation on what confident pay looks like in practice.

and how it connects to real business outcomes and what HR and comp leaders need to do to make decisions that they can stand behind. So let's start with each of the guests introducing themselves. We have the newbie on the podcast, Brittany, do you want to introduce yourself, tell everybody about what your role is here at PayScale and welcome to the podcast.

Brittni Beers-Branco (01:25.126)
Yeah, thank you, Ruth. I'm Brittany Beers Branco. I'm just joined PayScale not too long ago as the VP of People. And I'm delighted to be here. This report is something prior to PayScale that I relied on. So it's just wonderful to be here.

Payscale (01:43.19)
Great, thank you, Brittany. And Lauren, you joined us not long after you had just joined the organization. So you're a bit of a longer server now. Do you want to reintroduce yourself to the podcast audience?

Amy Stewart (01:44.562)
you

Lauren Hein (01:49.484)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Ruth. Yeah. Hi, this is my second podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Heine, Head of Total Rewards here with PayScale. As you said, I joined in September and I'm actually really excited to be joining Brittany as she is my direct manager here in PayScale. So it's a little fun to be doing this podcast together with her because I literally talk with her all day long about compensation. So this will be a fun conversation.

Payscale (02:18.64)
So I'm looking forward to hearing from both of you. Now, Amy, welcome back. Amy Stewart, you're often my companion on the podcast. Do you want to just reintroduce yourself to the audience?

Amy Stewart (02:29.038)
I don't know how many podcasts I've done at this point, but it's more than two. So I'm very excited to be back for the 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report. This is the annual baby that we give birth to here at PayScale that we're really excited about. And this year, I'm particularly excited about this podcast because it's not just going to be looking at the numbers, which you can read for yourself when you download the report. It comes out February 24th. But we have the folks who, you know, we make this report for.

Lauren Hein (02:33.208)
Hehehehe

Amy Stewart (02:56.974)
on the call with us today to let us know their reactions, how this is guiding strategy within organizations that we are looking to influence. So very excited about today.

Payscale (03:06.71)
Great, thank you. Well, welcome all three of you. We're going to start talking about confident pay or what you need to do to have confidence in pay. Amy, do you want to kick us off talking about what the data tells us about what influences confidence in pay decisions?

Amy Stewart (03:22.0)
Yes, this was a specific focus for CBPR this year. So we asked questions in the survey that informs the report. We asked about confidence from three different angles. We asked about how confident are you in your pay increases, like the strategy you have around that, the market pricing and total rewards. Those are all separate but related things that kind of influence the employee experience.

organization. And we're really excited to find that pay confidence is aligned with actual measurable outcomes. So we see that turnover, voluntary dirt turnover decreases as confidence increases. We also the time to fill like open positions decreases as confidence increases. And we see that this is even higher for pay scale customers versus non pay scale customers, which makes sense because you're using, you know, modern technology, data that you feel is accurate, and you have a strategy in place to make sure that your

Lauren Hein (03:53.614)
Hmm.

Amy Stewart (04:15.026)
Pay increases, your pricing and your total rewards are all aligned to data that is going to be market competitive and is going to be defensible in the pay communications that you have.

Payscale (04:27.85)
So good things happen when people are confident about pay. So Brittany is the HR leader here. How does compensation confidence show up in day-to-day decision making?

Brittni Beers-Branco (04:39.352)
Yeah, absolutely. From a day to day, I mean, you have anything as Amy mentioned, know, turnover, like you have might have people who are leaving, we're hiring people, we're creating new jobs, we're looking at promoting people. So there's just an ongoing employee lifecycle that we need to manage strategically. And so having data that really backs making those decisions really

supports the philosophy that you have in place, the architecture that you're putting in place. You know, that really helps bring having that data to be able to make informed, equitable decisions in a consistent way. So really, I can't underscore like having this information, having partnerships with companies like Payscale, I was a former customer for six years, and really does

give you the information that you need to have that confidence in those day-to-day decisions that you need to make.

Payscale (05:40.854)
And Lauren, from the kind of compensation lead perspective, how does confidence or maybe the lack of it affect total reward strategies?

Lauren Hein (05:50.22)
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I hate to start on the negative part of it, but lack of confidence is hugely disruptive to great total reward strategies. And I feel like we see a lot of it coming from managers not having confidence in talking about pay and compensation. And that really just goes down to being hesitant to talk about compensation. And what I always try to say

is that we need to be confident in having these conversations with our managers and being okay talking about compensation because ultimately at the end of the day, if they don't have confidence in the program and what you're doing in compensation, they're not going to be able to portray that down to employees. Hence our total reward strategy and everything that we put into it is just going to get kind of derailed. So when we do have confidence about talking about...

I think it is using that data to have the confidence to back up what you're saying. So we're not like over explaining or we're making up things and that is all in all. Like what brings us what we need to be doing to be confident in these conversations. Lots of C's right now.

Amy Stewart (07:03.726)
always.

Payscale (07:04.787)
Yeah. And I think, know, confidence equals trust, isn't it? I think you both kind of briefly mentioned it. So, you know, we definitely see employee trust go up once there is more confidence in, you know, feeling that they're being paid fairly. I mean, we often see that from the employee lens perspective. And as you say, Lauren, that's a really good, great point about managers feeling confident about being able to communicate to employees can have such a significant impact on how employees hear that messaging within the organization.

Lauren Hein (07:09.251)
Yes.

Brittni Beers-Branco (07:13.032)
Absolutely.

Payscale (07:34.804)
Now, another area the Compensation Best Practice Report covers is what's going on with pay and salary trends in 2026. So we're seeing flatter pay increases, more significant use of peanut butter increases. That's a trend that's been headlining if you've been reading any of the HR press, and Amy's gonna tell you a little bit more about that. And these pressures do make confidence harder to maintain, like restrained budgets make it harder to

Lauren Hein (07:42.766)
Hmm.

Payscale (08:04.274)
and maintain that confidence and trust in pay. Start us off, Amy, summarize what the CBPR data is telling us about pay budgets for this year. Set the scene for us.

Amy Stewart (08:13.522)
Yes, I will try to do this very succinctly. The report is very long. It's over 100 pages. There's like, full sections in there about the thing, the labor market, about pay increase management. But the headlines, if that's why you're tuning tuning in to get those big pieces, is that we are in a labor market where employers have the power, but where there are also expectations for high efficiency. And for that reason, we are seeing 75 % of orgs commit to pay increases in 2026 at all.

75 % is low compared to previous years. So there's fewer organizations giving any types of pay increases. And the pay increases they're giving is remaining flat at 3.5%. Whether or not that's the right number depends on your compensation philosophy and what kind of data metrics you use to determine pay within your industry and how you reward top performers. As Ruth mentioned, we're also seeing that

48 % of orgs are using a merit or a merit-based pay increase philosophy, but 44 % are either doing or considering peanut butter pay increases, which is a colloquial phrase for they're giving everyone the same percent regardless of performance. And that breaks down to 18 % considering it, 16 % implementing it, and 9 % always using that style, having already done that. We tend to see this approach

emerge more prevalently during economic turmoil. So we last saw it during the Great Recession from 2008-2009. We're not officially in a recession right now, like that hasn't been declared, but there are signals that feel similar or that we may be going that direction. So there's a lot of conservatism in the management of pay for organizations. So what they don't want to do is to overspend and then have to lay off. So there's a bit of balance with how can we be more efficient?

and use our dollars in the best way possible. You might think that the organizations that are giving peanut butter pay increases are making up for the performance in some other way, like total rewards, and I'm sure that Lauren can speak to that a little bit, but we do see in the data that 18 % of organizations, that's almost a fifth, so one out of every five HR leaders you talk to, are not doing any kind of paper performance at all. Not merit pay, not.

Amy Stewart (10:30.225)
Not not recognition, nothing. You think that might only apply to very small, immature organizations, but it doesn't. We see it across company sizes. It's a little bit stronger on smaller orgs than larger orgs, but we're seeing it across the data in all industries this year. So we have a detailed chart on that on the landing page for CBPR if you want to take a look at what the numbers look like by industry and by company size.

very fascinating this year and definitely a trend that we are watching and trying to provide guidance around.

Payscale (11:05.493)
Great, thanks, Amy. So lots of great on data to unpack in CBPR once you can get your hands on it. Now, Lauren, I mean, I've been a comp lead like you, so tight budget years are never fun. How do you go about balancing fairness and performance with a year where you've got financial constraints?

Lauren Hein (11:17.453)
and

Lauren Hein (11:24.556)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And Brittany and I are probably in these conversations almost every day as we are internally talking about merit and pay scale. But yeah, I think it really kind of goes back to anchoring in on your strategy. I feel like every year we say this, like, are tight and I feel like it's going to continue to be that year over year. So I think it's one, leveraging in your total reward strategy and also your comp philosophy. But you also need to think about what you're willing to

what you're kind of willing to give up. Like if you do have a pay for performance strategy or are you doing peanut butter approach where you can't afford to lose anyone in your company if you are just giving blanket increases across the board. So I think it's going back and anchoring on that strategy is like what is most important to you if you need to reward your high performers then anchoring your strategy about, okay, well our budget's only

3%. So where am going to put it? Am I going to put it for the high performers or am I going to peanut butter it? If I peanut butter it, am I still going to lose those high performers? What's the right strategy? So I think you have to kind of go back to thinking about what can you afford to possibly lose, but what can you also gain from a strategy that identifies any type of assets that might come out of the decision that you're making.

Payscale (12:49.994)
And it's hard to make broad recommendations because every organization has its own talent challenges, even if they're in the same industry, in the same location. Everybody's talent pipeline or talent challenges are unique. Brittany, mean, how do you think about managing this in this of tight pay budget scenario?

Brittni Beers-Branco (13:10.824)
Yeah, yeah, I it is, this can be challenging and I think as Lauren mentioned like starting with that strategy and knowing like what are you really targeting from from you managing.

really recognizing your high performers, if that is your strategy. I think what's really important is anchoring in what is it that you're doing and making that sound decision and being able to communicate that in a transparent way with your workforce to bring them along, right? Sometimes our budgets aren't as big as what we want. Compensation is personal to people. And so being able to equip your manager

with the right talk tracks, with having the broader communication to the organization to bring people along to know, this is what it's looking like. This is our strategy. This is what's important. And then also just to remember, you do have a total rewards strategy.

Compensation isn't, I know we're talking about compensation, but it's not the only lever. So it's really looking at what are the other levers that you can make sure you're pulling forward and reinforcing with your talent. And some of that is your experiences, your growth opportunities, like what else can you bring to the table? But just anchoring again back on being confident in what is the data that we have? What is it telling us? What is our strategy? What's really important for us to make sure?

We're retaining the talent that we need to retain and having open, transparent conversations to be able to bring people along. That can really help kind of, it doesn't always solve for it, but it does help build that confidence within the organization on what's important.

Lauren Hein (14:59.63)
I wanted to follow up on something that I think I glossed over and Brittany, you brought it up is that having fairness doesn't always mean, it doesn't mean equal, but this actually really goes back to then to not only are you in a compensation cycle, but making sure that you have a very clear and transparent performance review cycle as well, because then that's where that fairness.

isn't always equal and where you can kind of work with your budget between what performance is tied to in compensation. I think that's really helpful.

Payscale (15:36.17)
Yeah, well, great points. Thank you, both of you. Because think many people listening in will probably be going through the same scenario right now as if they've not already done their compensation review. Now, another trend that we did explore in the Compensation Best Practice Report this year is something that we started to observe probably kind of like Q2 last year. And this was the shift we were seeing of executives really starting to focus on compensation as an investment.

rather than compensation as a cost. So you're not worrying so much about like how much they were spending on compensation, but how impactful it was being within the organization. Now we did ask some questions about this compensation as a strategic lever, Amy, this year in the report. Do you want to tell us some of the outcomes that we saw?

Amy Stewart (16:25.893)
Yes, so as I alluded a little bit earlier, we measured how confidence is impacting measurable outcomes like voluntary turnover and time to fill. We have some other questions about, know, does the executive team want to know this information? What percentage of the time do they want to know this information? And I think it's a really it's a really good point to make to that confidence is a good indicator that organizations organization feel their strategy is working.

but you shouldn't stop with feelings. We can feel confident about unrealities. Sometimes the most uninformed opinions are the more confident one that comes across. So I'm sure you've encountered that.

really what you're trying to get at is the measurement. What does the data say? Because then your confidence is rooted rooted in that deep understanding and analytical insight of what's going on in your organization. So are you measuring your voluntary turnover rate or your retention rate? Do you measure your time to fill? Can you look at those numbers internally and measure them against pay gaps, against compa ratio, against attrition, against acceptance values, against flight risks? That's where the story's

get really interesting and really get into that like personal conversation and the ability to be proactive to keep people at your organization who are maybe underpaid compared to their peers or for their job description or a number of other factors. And really ask that question not are we paying enough but are we paying correctly for the people that we have in our organization? Are we incentivizing their engagement? Are we incentivizing their performance? How do we know that we are?

In the data, we see that 75 % of executive leaderships are asking questions about compensation related data point either occasionally or frequently. So your ELT wants to know this information. The trick is, are you measuring it? Do you have the right tools to provide those types of insights? And can you do it when it's needed? Like not.

Amy Stewart (18:23.981)
once a year during the pre-performance cycle, but can you do it when it's asked for all the time to influence business strategy throughout the year so that you're capitalizing on that kind round-the-clock intelligence.

Payscale (18:36.534)
Thank you, Amy. So, in this environment, how do people leaders make the case for compensation investment in executive conversations?

Brittni Beers-Branco (18:45.48)
Yeah, yeah, it's such a great question because I mean, compensation is really important to get right. And it's a really big investment in the organization. It's a big cost. It's a cost investment in the organization. having that the data to help inform like how to make those decisions or what's important is important. it's really important if I can't underscore that, right.

Lauren Hein (19:07.728)
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.

Payscale (19:09.535)
important.

Brittni Beers-Branco (19:12.808)
And, you know, oftentimes we get into kind of the day to day of just like, what are we experiencing? What are we seeing? we're having turnover, maybe, you know, it's our time to fill is lower, or there's this different experiences that we're having, having that opportunity to kind of take a step back, it's really important to understand, well, what's the big picture telling us? What are some of the drivers? so I mean, things like you leveraging our

pay scale compass, which I really love going in and seeing what's the indicators across different important, like our workforce investments, our workforce competitiveness, and just seeing how are we measuring up to some of our cohorts. So looking at the external market.

From an executive perspective, if we're looking at making investments, we need to know how are we measuring up to what's happening outside of the organization? Where are the gaps that we're experiencing? Are we experiencing high turnover in certain segments of our organization, like engineering? Or are we growing? Are we really investing in AI? And we need to go out and we need to hire or up-level our existing talent to kind of go into AI. So it's really understanding

how do we measure up against what's happening in the external market and having that data to help support building some of those business cases because making additional investments, especially when budgets are tight, is really important. You have a solid data to support what you're trying to put forward. so that's where these reports, knowing what's out there, having access to that data.

just as super important, you're not gonna be able to get decisions to move forward if you don't have that.

Payscale (20:57.46)
And Brittany, you're talking about Compass. So that's a new product that's coming out from PayScale. I some customers already have their hands on it. It's really, it's a very different approach from what we've done before. This is not talking about job benchmarking anymore. This is strategy benchmarking. we have an executive dashboard that you can look at how you're investing in compensation, but also how you're stretching the talent within your organization. And what you're able to do is benchmark that against

Brittni Beers-Branco (20:59.869)
Yeah.

Payscale (21:26.614)
peer organizations and you can choose cuts around what organizations you want to compare with. So you can do that. That's a lens that we often haven't had really in our roles before, is that being able to compare how does my comp strategy shape up versus a peer group and actually seeing that from a data perspective rather than maybe kind of like.

that you've heard from people that may have worked at another organisation or things that you've heard kind of like generally rolling around. And Lauren, any other metrics that you can think about within the organisation that help resonate with leadership when discussing compensation ROI or compensation effectiveness?

Lauren Hein (21:54.03)
you

Lauren Hein (22:01.422)
Thank you.

Lauren Hein (22:11.724)
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone really touched on them here. I think the biggest one that resonates with me when thinking about this is retention and regrettable attrition. What is your biggest expense as a company? And generally, that answer is going to be payroll. And payroll goes back to merit. Payroll goes back to compensation. So when we're having these discussions with executives and thinking about

what metrics we really need to consider is a whole employee life cycle is expensive. So making sure that we're investing in the right places for the right people, I think is super important and getting our executives to understand, okay, when we're having regrettable turnover, how long is it gonna take you to fill that role? How long was that person in the role? We don't think about, okay, if someone's only in a role for six months, how much did that cost us just for having them? We probably lost money on hiring them because

they weren't in the role long enough to either have the performance or now we have to go back and we have to do more recruiting spend, right? So I think the biggest thing is we have to think about whole employee life cycle for retention and recruitable attrition in that metric and getting our executives to really think about that rather than just the bottom line comp dollar.

Payscale (23:31.094)
Great, thank you. And when you are able to get your hands on the Compensation Best Practice Report, one of the things I loved in the report this year, Amy, was where we've correlated some of the key questions around voluntary turnover and time to fill roles, so two key metrics. So we can see, for example, when organizations are more pay confident, then it's a lower time to fill open vacancies and you have lower turnover.

and there are a number of those called out through the report. I was lucky enough to spend my morning reading that here today in detail, so that's why it's top of mind for me. But I did love that in the report this year. Okay, AI, we also talk about AI in the Compensation Best Practice Report. We dug into some new questions this year just so we can understand the sentiment of how AI is reshaping compensation management. We know trust remains a deciding factor, but Amy,

Lauren Hein (24:08.046)
you

Payscale (24:29.962)
What does the research say about how organizations are using AI in compensation today and where does trust break down?

Amy Stewart (24:37.169)
Yes, we have quite a few questions about AI in this year's report. It's our spotlight section. There are questions in the market about it. So we felt like we needed to provide some of that benchmarking to understand how your peers are thinking and acting.

on AI within compensation, we see anxiety too, and some strong opinions that are on the spectrum of we love it or we hate it when it comes to utilizing AI for certain types of decision making. I think it's important to keep in mind that AI isn't new. It feels new with the advent of

generative AI bots like ChatGPT, which hit the scene in 2023. But AI is like a broader umbrella, has been around much longer than that. Automation, machine learning, recommendation engines, these are all aspects of AI. And it's usually what we mean more so. We talk about making compensation decisions using technology. In a compensation space, for example, we can look at how to make compensation professionals

more valuable within the business and the human role that they have by giving them tools that can do some of the work for them without actually just replacing the human element. I don't think that that is what we are looking to do. It's about enabling people. It's about making processes more efficient. And it's about utilizing more of the data that you have than your human eye can necessarily calculate. So we see in our report that there are two primary things that users want when it comes to AI-powered

compensation decisions and that's transparency and accuracy. how, you know, can you show how AI came up with the number? Whether it is a pay increase recommendation or a salary range. Can you show what the result is and whether it is better than what I did manually with spreadsheet data alone? Can you do that over and over and over again? Where I start to trust that information.

Amy Stewart (26:38.419)
So this is where I think we'll really see AI take off when you start to really trust it is when you get that validation that the numbers that are coming in are the ones that are informing what's going out. It's not making things up or hallucinating or pulling from bad data. And the way that we have designed it is based on that survey grade level of HR reported data, which is really important when you're making pay decisions.

Payscale (27:05.366)
Great, thank you. lots of interesting facts to drill into there. Lauren, from your perspective, how do you feel about AI? What guardrails do you think are necessary when introducing AI into compensation workflows?

Lauren Hein (27:20.556)
definitely have a love-hate relationship with AI. Absolutely. But from my HR lens brain, when I think of AI, I think no PII. That is the one thing that my guardrail goes up where you can't take the human touch out of personal information and how you're actually working with people from an HR lens. I think where AI really helps me.

is spotting trends and patterns in the market that we can pressure test up against, you what are we doing internally as a company? But I would never be putting any type of like PII in an AI platform. I think that also when we're talking about AI and compensation decisions, as much as we could say that AI would, you know, kind of test where our decision making is and that we're removing bias and there we have equity in what the decisions that we are making.

A lot of times AI is just going to tell you what you want to hear. what it, it's learning about your framework. So yes, it might be bringing the personal bias out of it as, you know, stepping back as a, as a tool, a machine learning tool. I still think it is really important that after you use AI to, know, maybe a spot market trends or help build your philosophy that you're going back to you and your team as people to make sure that.

You're continuing to have equity and remove bias in your program is that is something that I feel like a machine will never be able to learn. They don't know the dynamics of your organization. They don't know what's going on day in and day out. don't know where AI doesn't know where you need to spend a lot of or invest a lot of your time or money and what's important to your product.

Payscale (29:07.614)
and Q and Brittany, what's your view on the AI story here?

Brittni Beers-Branco (29:12.628)
I think AI is very powerful. And I think that it can be very effective when used correctly. And I think it's important to understand what are the guardrails in using AI. For example, companies have different policies around who can use AI, what AI tools and technology, what can be put in AI.

But there are a lot of benefits to AI in terms of streamlining, automating, helping you make faster decisions, and freeing up your time from doing maybe some of those tactical things that aren't great value adds to be able to have that opportunity to really check the work and be able to take that step back to look at, what is it really telling us? And so I think that...

But what's important in using AI is still really understanding how is that AI working? How is it making decisions? Because still to maintain trust and confidence in the organization, you need to be able to articulate back to how did this decision get made, even if you're leveraging AI. So really understanding what's behind the AI technology that you're leveraging. What is it doing it? How is it making those decisions?

What are you having it do for you? And so it doesn't replace the human element. It's just the human element changes in terms of how you're engaging in the work. I'm a supportive of AI in the right context, in the right situations, but just knowing how to leverage it and how to really, again, still articulate what is it doing for us?

Lauren Hein (30:50.36)
Bye.

Payscale (31:05.652)
Yeah, I mean, I definitely see the advantages of like, remember many year ends where you were just literally crunching the numbers or putting spreadsheets back together. And you never felt like you were having that chance to just take that helicopter view and go, okay, what is this actually telling me? Well, the benefits of AI is it can process all that data for you. So you can have more time to say, okay, well, what key trends am I seeing here in terms of manager recommendations? But again, like human in the loop, as you said, Lauren,

Often there are elements of a person's contribution to the organization that can't be managed or measured in data or represented in data. And so there's a layer of that human in the loop has to happen on top of programmatic recommendations about what compensation should be based on the key data points that you've got.

Payscale (31:58.594)
Okay, so we're going to close out. I've got a couple of questions. I'm just going to check, Lauren and Brittany, have you actually had a sneak peek at the compensation best practice report after? So I can't ask you the question about what would be your one takeaway because you haven't read it yet. Amy and I can answer that question. I'll ask you another question. So be prepared. Okay, Amy, what was your one takeaway from the 2026 CBPR report that you would like the listeners

Lauren Hein (32:11.15)
Yeah, you.

Brittni Beers-Branco (32:15.074)
I know.

Lauren Hein (32:17.966)
Okay.

Payscale (32:27.252)
to hear and leaders shouldn't ignore.

Amy Stewart (32:29.821)
Thank you so much. Yes, it is hard to pick just one. But I would say that pay is becoming more and more transparent. And for that reason, organizations need to increase their compensation management maturity to keep up with the transparency expectations. We're seeing this take place in a big way in 2026. I've been looking at the pay transparency spectrum every year for the last six years. This percentage, the organizations targeting transparency, either organization wide or publicly.

jumped from a third to almost a half of organizations. The EU Pay Transparency Directive has something to do with that, but there's other pressures that are happening in a lot of places for why that jump happened. And likewise, we're seeing the compensation maturity jump 12%, because in order to be transparent, you have to have confidence that pay is equitable. In order to be equitable, you have to have compensation strategy. You have to have structures. You have to have a

formal architecture, you need all of these things. that necessity to do all of the steps in order to be mature, in order to be transparent, is becoming pressurized for organizations across the spectrum at all sizes. But I'm really excited about where the future is going to take us because when that foundation is set, we can start to really do some interesting things when it comes to.

Payscale (33:51.912)
Yeah, great. And then Lauren and Brittany, then what is one practical step organisations can take this year to increase confidence and pay that we've been talking about today?

Brittni Beers-Branco (34:02.588)
Yeah, I'm... Go for it.

Lauren Hein (34:03.534)
Can I do two? I have two. I would say align and train is going to be like the two practical steps for your organization, especially because we know, I feel like a lot of this message is going to be hard this year. So I think we really just need to be one, transparent, but also be able to align and train with our managers, with our ELT, even with your employees.

you need to be able to have the conversation of why the market is the way it is and why it's affecting these decisions that it is in your merit and organization. So yeah, I would say just like be confident in your trainings, be confident in aligning with your teams because you're going to need the help from your managers and your ELT to back what decisions are being made.

Brittni Beers-Branco (34:57.224)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, a lot of things always come back to me with like scaling, how do you always continue to properly scale in an organization and having confidence in what you're doing? And when it comes to compensation, so I think even just with your mature understanding where you're at in your own maturity model, and where do you want to go over the next year or two years?

Payscale (34:58.304)
Brittany from you.

Brittni Beers-Branco (35:23.292)
and really breaking that down into, okay, well, what do we need to do in order to get there? And just, and then what does that mean? Do I need to create the, if transparency is becoming more and more prevalent in the market and maybe you're not there yet as an organization, where are you at on the maturity model? What are the things that you need to do to get, to put that in place? So you are able to really effectively compete in the market because more and more employees,

are going to be looking for that in an organization. so getting that infrastructure in place, getting the right data, getting the right structure, the architecture, the strategy, and just knowing where you're at now and where you need to go and where you ultimately want to be so you can kind of build that out. So that's a little long. I love what Lauren said in terms of like for right now, like there's a lot of goodness in terms of aligning and communicating for now while you're also building to scale for the future.

So it's kind of a little bit of balancing for both.

Payscale (36:23.834)
So all great contributions to the conversation we've had today about confidence in pay. Now, one of the reasons we release the Compensation Best Practice Report annually is so that you can be confident in your compensation and pay strategies. So that will be coming out on the February the 24th. Amy, did I get that right? Yep. So if you want to explore the data behind the conversation today, look out for the release of that report. And also you can...

get a head start and start participation or you can sign up to participate in our 2027 compensation best practice survey as well. As always, we'd love to hear from you and what you thought of the conversation today. If there's another topic you'd like us to discuss, you can email us at coffee at payscale.com or join the conversation on LinkedIn. But I'd love to say thank you very much, Amy, Lauren and Brittany for joining me today. I know it's a very busy time.

for all three of you right now with the report coming out and we are just entering year end at play scale. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Lauren Hein (37:30.146)
Thank you.

Brittni Beers-Branco (37:30.216)
Thank you. Bye.

Payscale (37:31.734)
Thanks very much everybody, bye bye.

Lauren Hein (37:33.432)
Bye.

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