Pay Transparency Directive: HR challenges and Elevo’s solutions, insights from Arnaud Lemoine

Pay transparency is now at the top of many companies’ agendas with the arrival of the new European directive. This topic, which directly affects HR teams, requires organizations to rethink their practices to ensure both fairness and compliance. At Elevo, we support organizations in addressing this challenge by developing products designed to simplify HR workflows while meeting their strategic needs.

To explore this topic further, we spoke with Arnaud Lemoine, Product Manager at Elevo for the past two years. With five years of experience in both B2B and B2C environments, Arnaud has contributed to the development of Elevo’s Surveys and Compensation products. In this interview, he shares his perspective on the challenges HR teams face regarding compensation and how Elevo helps address them.

French companies have until June 2026 to comply with the new rules introduced by the European Pay Transparency Directive. While developing Elevo’s Compensation pillar, you interviewed many HR leaders. According to them, what are the main challenges they will face to achieve compliance by 2026?

Arnaud Lemoine: This European directive will bring several challenges for companies over the next two to three years. Within this tight timeline, there are five major challenges. The first is that, as of late 2024, the directive has not yet been fully transposed into national legislation. However, it will be the national implementation that companies must comply with starting in June 2026.

Several points still need clarification:

• The company size thresholds to which the law will apply. The directive defines three thresholds at 100, 150, and 250 employees, but the French government could decide to lower these thresholds.
• The exact reporting requirements companies will need to provide (for example, gender equality indicators).

The second challenge is collecting the data necessary to provide a clear overview of compensation, including pay gaps and their justification. This includes:

1. Compensation data for employees and their peers,
2. Performance, engagement, and potential data,
3. Salary increase history.

The third challenge is defining salary structures. Once organizations have visibility on existing data, they must establish salary ranges by role and location that reflect their compensation objectives.

The fourth challenge is implementing a fair compensation policy. Companies must define the rules managers should follow when proposing salary increases knowing that these rules may become public. They therefore need to be clear, transparent, and fair. Large organizations must also harmonize processes across entities to avoid inconsistencies.

The fifth challenge is empowering managers during salary review cycles. To implement a fair and transparent compensation policy, managers must be actively involved in a process that is often new to them and sometimes poorly understood.

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How does Elevo’s Compensation pillar help companies address these challenges?

Arnaud Lemoine: The Compensation pillar was designed specifically to support organizations through these challenges. It adapts to companies of all sizes by offering flexible configurations, particularly regarding budget allocation.

Because the Compensation pillar is integrated within the Elevo Talent Suite, companies can leverage all the data already available within the platform. There is no need to aggregate information from multiple tools—the necessary data is already centralized in Elevo, including compensation data, career paths, and performance evaluations. This centralization is a major advantage, allowing HR teams and managers to easily access key insights, such as the talent groups defined during People Reviews.

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The Compensation pillar includes two key products: “Compensation grid with Analysis” and “Salary Review.” How do they complement each other and help HR teams build a fair compensation policy?

Arnaud Lemoine: First, the Compensation grid product allows HR teams to define the foundations of their compensation policy by setting salary targets by role and location. The product then enables organizations to associate employees with these salary bands in order to:

1. Analyze current salaries compared to compensation grid,
2. Ensure that compensation policies are being applied,
3. Identify and understand discrepancies between actual salaries and compensation targets,
4. Monitor gender pay gaps within specific roles

Building on the Compensation grid product and providing a simple, unified process, the Salary Review product equips HR teams with everything they need to run fair and effective salary reviews across the organization, all within the Compensation pillar.

The Compensation pillar was also designed to fully involve managers in this critical process. With a simple and intuitive interface, managers are guided throughout the review process and have access to all the information they need to make informed decisions that benefit both employees and the organization:

• Salary position relative to compensation grid,
• Goal achievement,
• People Review results,
• Compensation history

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Beyond legal compliance, what strategic benefits can companies gain from Elevo’s Compensation pillar?

Arnaud Lemoine: There are many benefits to using Elevo’s Compensation solution:

1. Significant time savings: what previously required hundreds of hours of preparation for compensation reviews can now be completed in minutes thanks to data already available within Elevo.
2. Secure salary review processes: each manager only sees the information relevant to their scope.
3. More equitable budget allocation: using Elevo’s data helps ensure that compensation budgets reward the right employees while preventing widening pay gaps.
4. A clear compensation policy that guides managers’ decision-making and helps reduce gender pay inequalities.
5. A stronger employer brand: transparent and fair compensation policies can help attract top talent.
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From a user experience perspective, how was this pillar designed to be intuitive for HR teams and managers?

Arnaud Lemoine: As with any new product or feature, we started by interviewing more than 25 Elevo customers to understand their challenges and needs related to compensation management.

With these insights in mind, we designed the interface for the Compensation pillar. Before launching development, we conducted user testing with our customers to ensure the product would effectively address their needs.

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How does the Compensation pillar integrate with other Elevo products, such as Reviews, People Reviews, or Skills, to provide a complete HR management solution?

Arnaud Lemoine : For salary reviews to be effective, they must complement other HR processes. That’s precisely why choosing a compensation solution integrated within a Talent Suite like Elevo is so valuable.

The Compensation pillar incorporates insights from previous HR exercises, such as talent groups identified during People Reviews or goal achievement evaluated during performance reviews. It also provides quick access to summaries of 360° Feedback and Review through Elevo AI.

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If you would like to learn more about our Compensation pillar, contact one of our HR experts.

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