Do you have a transparent compensation structure that employees can view and influence?

Business as Usual conceals the reward and salary structure from employees

Wehkamp

Wehkamp operates with a traditional compensation structure where salary decisions are not fully transparent to employees. Pay levels are typically set within management structures, with limited visibility into how individual salaries compare across roles or teams.

This lack of transparency can make it difficult for employees to understand how their compensation is determined or how it relates to internal benchmarks. In practice, this can create information asymmetry between management and staff.

In a legal case, a female employee was found to have earned less than a male colleague performing equal work, and this was judged as unjustified pay inequality. Cases like this highlight how opaque systems can allow inconsistencies in compensation to persist without being immediately visible internally.

Future Entrepreneurs co-create the salary structure with employees

Voys

Voys operates as a self-managing, steward-owned telecom company where compensation is designed as an open system rather than a top-down decision. Salaries are not determined by managers but through a structured peer-based process.

Employees use a transparent framework based on the Baarda model, which evaluates roles through factors such as complexity, autonomy, and impact. This allows colleagues to understand how roles are valued and how compensation levels are constructed.

Because employees participate in and can review the system, compensation becomes something that is collectively maintained rather than privately assigned. This reduces ambiguity and makes pay structures more logical and adjustable over time.

What you can do

If you want to design your salary structure like a Future Entrepreneur, here are some practical tips:

• Make pay logic visible, not just outcomes
  Don’t only share salaries, but also the principles and criteria behind them so employees understand how decisions are made.
• Involve employees in shaping compensation frameworks
  Move from management-defined pay bands to co-created systems where employees can contribute to design and adjustments.
• Regularly audit and correct internal pay gaps
  Actively review compensation for unjustified differences and make correction processes transparent and routine.