A warehouse associate spots a new job posting from your company that pays more per hour than they make for the same role, and they ask their shift supervisor about it on their break. What happens next tells you whether your compensation philosophy lives anywhere outside a spreadsheet at head office.
On a recent episode of HR on the Frontline, compensation veteran David Turetsky argued that the reflex answer many managers give in that moment, “Talk to HR,” quietly erodes the trust you need to keep frontline people.
David has spent more than 35 years in HR as a self-described “compensation geek” and HR technologist, and today he’s managing consultant at HR Data Labs. In his conversation with host Noah Mithrush, he laid out what pay transparency means for frontline teams, why managers need to own pay conversations, and how a clear pay philosophy makes those conversations easier. Below you’ll find his playbook, research that backs it up, and practical steps you can put in front of your managers this quarter.
Most pay transparency advice is written for salaried teams with laptops, inboxes and an HR business partner down the hall. This post is written for everyone else: the hourly, shift-based and multi-site employees who, according to UKG, make up nearly 80% of the global workforce, and the store managers, shift leads and site supervisors who answer their questions.
What is a compensation philosophy, and why does pay transparency make it urgent?
A compensation philosophy is a short set of statements that explains how and why your organization pays people the way it does: where you aim against the market, how base pay, incentives and benefits fit together, and how pay changes over time. Pay transparency laws and open pay conversations mean employees can now compare your numbers with the market, so managers need that philosophy in plain language to answer pay questions accurately the first time without routing every one to HR.
Pay transparency is the practice, and in a growing number of places the legal requirement, of sharing pay information openly, most visibly by publishing salary ranges in job postings. In the US, Brightmine counts 27 jurisdictions with enacted pay transparency laws as of October 1, 2026, a list that includes states and cities. In Canada, Ontario employers with 25 or more employees have had to include expected pay or a pay range in publicly advertised job postings since January 1, 2026.
David’s view on whether to post a range is simple: post it, and make it honest. Companies post huge ranges because they’re afraid to commit to a number, he said, and he pointed to a well-known example from 2023, when Netflix advertised a flight attendant role with a posted range of $60,000 to $385,000. Without offering legal advice, David said a range like that “definitely violates the spirit of the law.”
“Absolutely post the pay range, but post the relevant range. Don’t just post $50,000 to $2 million. That doesn’t help anybody.”
David Turetsky · HR on the Frontline
So what counts as relevant? David said much of the guidance he’s seeing points to a posted range no wider than 20% to 40%, ideally the slice of your full salary band where you actually expect to hire, such as a quartile or two. Ontario drew a firmer line: a posted range there can’t span more than $50,000 a year, and positions paying more than $200,000 are exempt. The familiar “depending on experience” disclaimer doesn’t rescue an inflated range either, since every range already reflects experience and certifications. David called that move “definitely a cop-out.”
David sees this shift as a net positive for employers who are ready for it. “The interesting part about pay transparency is it’s not creating an issue, it’s solving an issue,” he said, since candidates now have far better information about the job market. Here’s why all of this lands on managers. The moment a range goes public, your current employees can see it too, so the posting your recruiter published yesterday becomes the question your shift supervisor gets this morning.
The episode asks whether pay questions should skip HR entirely, and David’s answer is that they shouldn’t have to start there. Managers are the people frontline employees see every day, and they carry context HR usually doesn’t have, including the employee’s hours, performance, career goals and the conversations they’ve already had about pay.
“Unless you train a manager on what all those things mean, the manager’s just going to say, ‘Talk to HR.’ That’s not a good experience for employees, especially when they’re in the candidate phase.”
David Turetsky · HR on the Frontline
When a pay question gets bounced to HR, the employee has to explain their situation again to someone who doesn’t know them, and the answer can take weeks if the HR team is stretched. David has seen a worse version firsthand, where managers made promises about pay, left the company without writing anything down, and took the employee’s trust with them. For frontline workers, he said, the window to get it right is short. “You don’t get too many swings at the plate,” he said. “If they don’t feel like they’re being taken seriously or being taken care of, they’re going to leave, because they can go anywhere, and they will.”
On the frontline, “Talk to HR” is often harder than it sounds. HR may sit at head office or another site, plenty of deskless employees don’t have a work email, and the only free time they have may be a short break between tasks. As Noah put it, managers are “sandwiched in between head office and the employees on the front line.” When the answer has to travel that far, it often comes back late or not at all, which feeds a perception many frontline workers already hold. In a UKG study of 8,200 frontline workers, nearly half said they believe their organization has two cultures.
HR still has a central role here. David was clear that bringing HR into a conversation is never a bad move, and the healthiest setup has HR building the framework and tools while managers use them to answer accurately the first time.
HR on the Frontline podcast
Hear the full conversation, where David and Noah also dig into AI pay checks, tipped-worker pay, why frontline workers so often boomerang back to former employers, and how to handle benefits enrollment season.
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Most pay transparency coverage focuses on salaried corporate roles, yet as Noah pointed out, warehouse associates, hotel housekeepers and line workers are often the ones most affected by not knowing what a job pays. Research from DailyPay and Workday, conducted by The Harris Poll among 2,208 US hourly workers aged 18 to 45, found that 84% say pay clarity is a priority, but only 57% are very satisfied with the pay clarity they get. Nearly half (46%) borrow money between pay periods. Across the broader workforce, PwC’s 2026 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found 49% of employees say their compensation isn’t keeping up with costs.
David sees an opening for employers in that gap. Frontline candidates can now compare postings across competitors and look up the minimum wage for a role, tipped or untipped, in seconds, so the employers who explain their pay clearly stand out. Riffing on retailer Sy Syms’s old slogan, “An educated consumer is our best customer,” David put it this way: “An educated candidate is your best candidate because they will understand your ethos, they’ll understand and trust that you’re trying to take care of them.”
David Turetsky on why pay transparency conversations still leave frontline teams out. Watch on LinkedIn
Noah asked the question plenty of employers are thinking: what happens when you can’t match the wages competitors are posting? David didn’t sugarcoat his answer: both office and frontline workers know where the money is because they can see it in the postings, so “they’d better have some secret sauce about how they treat their employees,” he said, meaning something that ties people to the job beyond the hourly rate.
He also expects wage pressure to keep building. In his view, what’s happening with immigration in the US is shrinking the labor supply in industries that depend on immigrant workers, and with demand holding steady, the price of those hours goes up. He doesn’t see automation closing that gap for most frontline roles. Meanwhile, the frontline is where engagement is weakest. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that only 17% of on-site employees who can’t work remotely are engaged, the lowest of the four work-location groups it tracks.
The upside is that frontline workers often want to stay. In a Kahoot! survey of 4,000 frontline workers in the US and UK, 62% said they see their role as a long-term career, even as 39% are thinking about leaving in the next 12 months. Recognition is one of the levers that helps close that gap: Gallup research found that well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have turned over after two years. David named it himself when describing the secret sauce, saying it “might be an opportunity for a recognition program.”
Year-end is one of the best places to start, and one of the easiest places to miss frontline teams, since some frontline employees don’t have a work email for a digital gift to land in.
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Get the free playbookDavid describes pay philosophy as “a way of being able to be open about how you want the relationship between employees and employer to be.” In practice, it spells out how, why and what you pay, and why you pay it that way. Some organizations aim to be the best payer in their market because they demand a lot from their people. Others keep base pay modest and make up the difference with incentives that put total compensation at the 75th percentile. Plenty of companies run that second model without ever saying so out loud, David noted, which leaves employees to work it out on their own.
For frontline roles, the philosophy has to make sense to someone reading it in a break room. David noted that some organizations pay hourly roles on step rates, moving people up a set ladder from a starting rate, and that works well as long as employees know where the steps are and what earns the next one. Spell out the hourly reality in plain terms: what the posted rate is, what shift premiums or tips add, what moves someone up, and what the benefits are worth on top of the hourly number.
Every philosophy should reflect your business, so treat the statements below as starting points. Each one is written from a model David described in the episode, in the kind of language a frontline manager could repeat word for word.
Once it’s written, put it where candidates will find it. David’s advice is to post your pay philosophy in the same place as your job postings, so people understand how and why you pay before they ever apply. As he put it, “Be upfront from the beginning.”
David’s advice on pay communication fits in three words: “Communicate, communicate, communicate.” The hard part on the frontline is getting the message to people who don’t sit in front of a screen. A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Staffbase, which surveyed frontline workers and managers in US retail, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics in August 2026, found that only 23% of frontline workers feel fully supported. Among the frontline workers and managers surveyed, 48% said information gaps lower their productivity, more than half have to piece together what they need from six or more channels, and 35% run into conflicting, outdated or unclear information at least a few times a week.
Pay information is exactly the kind of message that can’t afford to be conflicting. A few practical ways to reach deskless teams:
Pick one source of truth for pay rules, then repeat it in the places frontline employees already are. A posted range on a job ad, a one-page pay guide in the break room and a two-minute explanation in a pre-shift huddle should all say the same thing, and a named manager at each site should know where that source of truth lives.
David starts from a blunt observation: nobody is born knowing how to manage, and HR often assumes a promotion comes with that knowledge built in. On the frontline, that manager might be a store lead or a charge nurse who was promoted for being great at the work itself, and now they’re also expected to translate your compensation strategy for employees and candidates. The training has to fit the job, so think in short, practical modules a manager can absorb between shifts. These five steps come straight from David’s advice.
David’s prescription was specific: “You have to give them a script. You have to give them rules. You have to give them the why, the how, the philosophy so that they can answer those basic questions.” A manager who can explain what a $21.50 hourly rate includes, from base pay to benefits and other compensation elements, keeps the conversation inside the relationship where trust already lives.
Write a one-page pay guide for each frontline role family that covers the posted range, what moves someone through it, when reviews happen and who to loop in for exceptions.
When pay transparency laws first arrived, David heard employers worry that everyone would suddenly want a raise. His response was practical: “Can they all have raises? No, of course they can’t have raises. Okay, there’s your answer. Now train your managers on how to say that in a nice way.” The honest version usually sounds like this: the market moved, we haven’t caught everyone up yet, and here’s the plan to get current employees there over time. David called that “a mature conversation, rather than either no or talk to HR.”
Run a 20-minute role-play at your next manager meeting where one person plays an employee holding up a new job posting and the other answers using your pay guide.
Noah shared a theme he heard across sessions at SHRM this year: managers often hold back from hard conversations with employees because they fear the conflict, and pay is about as hard as those conversations get. David’s answer was coaching. “Inevitably, it’s going to happen,” he said, so managers need to practice what a good pay conversation sounds like before an upset employee is standing in front of them. That includes being honest when something is off. When pay has fallen behind, David suggested a manager can say, “We’re going to be looking at that because we recognize that there are some pay inequities, and we’re going to take care of them,” and then make sure HR follows through on that commitment.
Give managers a go-to line, such as “I hear you, and I want to get you a real answer. Let me check our ranges and come back to you by Friday.” Then hold them to the follow-up date.
There’s a four-letter word in compensation, and it’s always on top of people’s minds when they’re talking to their boss. More.
David Turetsky
Managing consultant, HR Data Labs
Employees are already running their pay through AI tools. David warned that some of what comes back may be hallucinated or pulled from stale data on sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn, though a well-built prompt that points to current postings for the exact job and location can be fairly accurate. Either way, the manager’s response is the one compensation teams have always used: check the published survey sources and tools you trust, and if there’s an inequity, come back with a fix. As David pointed out, frontline employees don’t even need a chatbot, since they can read the pay right off job postings, which is all the more reason to have your numbers ready.
Agree on two or three pay data sources your organization trusts, so managers can tell employees exactly what you’ll check their question against.
David admitted that back in the 1990s at Morgan Stanley, he was the one calling people into his office to warn them they’d be fired if they discussed their pay again. “Well, I can’t do that anymore,” he said. In the US, the National Labor Relations Board states that employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act have the right to communicate with other employees at their workplace about their wages, and as Noah noted, younger workers tend to treat pay as an open book. David’s advice is to allow healthy conversations, and when someone is upset, “handle it rationally and unemotionally, and deal with it factually in a business-like manner.”
Review your handbook, offer letters and manager training for any pay-secrecy language, and confirm the rules for each location with employment counsel. This post isn’t legal advice.
David has argued publicly for a while that the merit increase process is broken. “You can’t really differentiate on performance based on a 3% increase,” he said, because the gap between 4% for exceeding expectations and 3% for meeting them won’t change how anyone works. Budgets aren’t moving much either. Mercer’s QuickPulse survey of 1,001 US organizations projects 2027 merit increases of 3.2% and total salary increases of 3.5%.
For hourly workers, the math makes David’s point even sharper. A 3% raise on an $18 hourly rate works out to 54 cents an hour, and a 4% raise is 72 cents, a difference of 18 cents an hour between an average performer and a top one.
His alternative is a cost-of-living adjustment across the board, paired with incentive pay tied to company goals, so a strong year can be shared with everyone at levels a merit budget can’t reach. Whether or not you go that far, the status quo isn’t landing with employees. In the McLean & Company 2026 Employee Engagement Trends Report, which covers more than 254,000 employees, total compensation was the lowest-scoring engagement driver at 52%.
Annual cycles create edge cases, and David says your philosophy should cover them so managers have room to make good decisions. When someone is hired two months before the merit cycle, he typically builds the increase into their starting pay, offering $104,000 instead of $100,000, for example, or gives a prorated increase at the cycle. What he warns against is telling a new hire, “We don’t really have a process, so we’re not going to give you anything, and you’re going to have to wait 14 months for an increase.”
A related risk shows up in your own job postings. When hiring ranges climb with the market faster than current pay, new hires can land close to, or even above, people who’ve been on the floor for years. That’s pay compression, and on frontline teams, where coworkers on the same shift compare notes, it rarely stays quiet. David’s step 2 answer applies here: acknowledge that the market moved, and commit to a plan for bringing current employees up.
Before a new range goes live, compare it with what current employees in that role earn, and budget the adjustments before someone has to ask.
David has spent more than 35 years in HR as a compensation specialist and HR technologist. He’s managing consultant at HR Data Labs, hosts the weekly HR Data Labs podcast and writes the HR Data Doodles book series on how HR can help the business.
David widened the lens beyond pay. Many employees don’t understand their full compensation package, he said, so they skip the benefits webinar, miss discounted vision or pet insurance, and re-elect last year’s plan without noticing the costs changed. That gap matters on the frontline, where benefits are a real differentiator. A study from idealis. and CivicScience found that 89% of frontline workers say health insurance is important to them, yet only 44% report access to employer-provided medical insurance.
If you’re paying for benefits that people don’t understand, you’re losing the return on one of your biggest investments. In David’s words, “the less you communicate this stuff, the less you’re going to get a return on the investment that you’re spending for those dollars for your benefit programs and your compensation programs, and that’s just wasting money.” The employers he’s seen do this well spent real time and money making enrollment sessions engaging, highlighted cost changes, and made sure people understood what they were choosing.
“You don’t want to give them more opportunity to hate you. You want to give them more opportunity to thank you.”
David Turetsky · HR on the Frontline
Send every frontline employee a one-page total rewards statement before open enrollment that shows base pay, premiums, the dollar value of benefits, incentives and recognition in one place, and walk through it in a pre-shift huddle.
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Book a fit checkWhen Noah asked for the one mindset shift that would help frontline workers most, David kept it simple: communication and openness. “Talk to them, and second of all, listen to them,” he said. He pointed to the CHRO at Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams who visits individual locations to hear from frontline staff and lets what she hears shape policy. His closing advice for every HR leader was the same: “Listen to your workers. They’ve got a lot to say.”
A compensation philosophy is a set of statements explaining how and why an organization pays people the way it does. It typically covers where you aim against the market, how base pay, incentives and benefits fit together, and how pay changes over time, so managers and employees can understand pay decisions.
Most philosophies cover market position, pay mix between base pay and incentives, how employees move through a range, when raises happen, how exceptions such as new-hire timing are handled, and the value of benefits. Writing it in plain language matters, because frontline managers are the ones who will explain it.
Managers should be equipped to answer common pay questions themselves, with HR supporting them on exceptions. Routing every question to HR forces employees to re-explain their situation and can delay answers by weeks, which erodes trust, especially with frontline workers who can easily find another job.
On HR on the Frontline, compensation expert David Turetsky said much of the current guidance points to a posted range no wider than 20% to 40%, focused on where you actually expect to hire. Some laws set firmer limits; Ontario caps posted ranges at $50,000 a year. Check the rules in each location where you post jobs.
In the US, the National Labor Relations Board states that employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act have the right to communicate with coworkers about their wages. Rules differ by country, province and state, so confirm your obligations with employment counsel.
Use the channels frontline employees already rely on, such as pre-shift huddles, break room postings, printed or mobile pay guides and onboarding packets, and make sure every channel says the same thing. Train site managers to explain the posted range, what moves someone up and what benefits are worth, since they’re the first people employees will ask.
Pay compression happens when the pay of newer employees creeps close to that of experienced employees in the same role, usually because hiring ranges rise with the market faster than current pay. When new hires actually earn more than tenured staff, it’s often called pay inversion.
Compensation expert David Turetsky argues they rarely change behavior, since the gap between a 3% and a 4% raise is too small to matter. With Mercer projecting 2027 US merit budgets of 3.2%, he favors a cost-of-living adjustment for everyone plus incentive pay tied to company goals.