Blog

– Index –

Date: 10/06/2025
Author: Francisco Massó Mora

“IT’S THE SALARY, STUPID!”: THE BROKEN LINK IN TALENT MANAGEMENT

Recently, I came across a provocative and brilliant article on LinkedIn that, with irony and clarity, revived Clinton’s old political slogan this time adapted to the business world: “It’s the salary, stupid!” With a direct tone and concrete examples, the author -someone who has been both in the trenches and in the classroom of Human Resources-, pointed to an uncomfortable truth: the hypocrisy behind many people related policies that ignore the central role of salary as the real engine of motivation.

The article, critical and challenging, deserves to be widely read and discussed. But beyond the conversational tone used to portray certain vices of modern management, it opens the door to a more structural reflection: how did we come to accept that what is essential is treated as secondary in talent management?

In the field of people management, we often encounter carefully crafted narratives about corporate culture, emotional well-being, organizational purpose, and talent development. Yet we continue to fail at the most fundamental level: pay. Not symbolic pay, not emotional compensation, not the “total rewards package” wrapped in colorful PowerPoint infographics. The actual salary the one that arrives at the end of the month, that feeds you, that pays the mortgage. Motivation starts (and often ends) with the payslip.

In recent years, the concept of “emotional salary” has been sold as if it were a substitute for money. Fresh fruit in the office kitchen, ping-pong tables, flexible hours, or lunchtime TED Talks are all nice perks. But they can never replace a decent salary. People work for money. And if it’s not enough, the rest is just window dressing.

Emotional salary can complement, but never replace, financial compensation. You can’t ask for commitment, innovation, or resilience from employees who feel they are barely making ends meet while the company reports record EBITDA.

That’s why compensation policy must stop being a mere operational detail and become a core part of the organizational strategy. Not to reduce everything to numbers, but to prevent good intentions from collapsing due to a lack of economic foundation.

Drawing on experience and evidence, there are certain principles that everyone with authority over salary matters should embrace as a mantra:

1. Functional, not emotional, equity: Compensation should be linked to the value of the position, not to the subjectivity of personal relationships or an individual’s negotiating skills. Internal parity is not merely an ethical aspiration, it’s a prerequisite for organizational sustainability. Romanticizing “individual treatment” as fairness actually opens the door to opacity. Salary bands exist to prevent arbitrariness and to ensure internal justice. If two people perform the same job, they should fall within the same pay range. Period.
2. Simplicity in Communication: A compensation system that cannot be clearly explained to employees is not well-designed. Transparency is not just a moral virtue, it is an operational necessity. Every employee should understand not only how much they earn, but also why they earn that amount, relative to the market and to their peers. The problem isn’t the availability of information, it’s the lack of consistency it might expose. The real challenge is being able to share the compensation policy without setting the company on fire.
3. Salary Sustainability: You cannot build a culture of belonging if employees know —or even just suspect— that they are paid less than their colleagues performing similar roles within the organization”. Salary offers must be benchmarked against the market, but they also need to reflect the candidate’s prior earnings trajectory. Hiring someone below their previous salary is rarely sustainable. The short-term savings are often paid for in turnover, frustration, or underperformance.
4. Consistency in progression: A strong compensation system isn’t the one that excites at the time of the offer, it’s the one that still makes sense two years later. If someone joins at a low salary and that imbalance is never corrected, they will leave. Or worse, they’ll stay, but unmotivated. Salary evolution must align with actual professional growth. A policy in which raises are arbitrary, symbolic, or inconsistent will eventually erode the credibility of the system. Merit only matters if it results in tangible outcomes.
5. Economically meaningful reviews—not symbolic ones: A 20% raise might look heroic on a spreadsheet, but if it amounts to just €250 net per month, the epic gesture quickly turns into disappointment. What employees notice isn’t the percentage, it’s the impact on their lives. HR language must reconnect with real life, not with financial rhetoric.

The paradox of many contemporary organizations is that they’ve sophisticated their employee value proposition to the point of forgetting the essentials. Salary has become a footnote in the corporate narrative, when in fact it’s the first and most powerful message a company sends to its people.

In companies that invest heavily in attracting and developing talent, compensation should be at the heart of organizational design, not treated as a marginal administrative task. And yet, it is often handled as a side detail, an uncomfortable technicality that runs in parallel to “what really matters.”

Organizations that forget this don’t just lose talent: they lose legitimacy. Because salary, ultimately, is not just a technical matter. Nor is it merely emotional. It is a matter of respect.

Share in social networks:

– Index –
Previous | Next