A new crisis in confidence over pay fairness is emerging in UK workplaces, according to a study from HiBob. The HCM platform’s latest research reveals a widening disconnect between how organizations believe they’re managing pay and promotion decisions and how those decisions are actually landing with employees.
Despite 83% of people managers saying they can clearly justify compensation decisions with data, more than three-quarters have faced formal challenges on promotions, pay adjustments, and performance ratings within the past year alone.
The consequences of this disconnect are proving costly. More than nine in ten managers report that missing or poorly timed data has directly contributed to negative team outcomes in the past year, ranging from high performers being underpaid to premature promotions that set employees up to fail.
The research surveyed managers and found a troubling pattern: confidence in pay transparency is colliding with reality and actively undermining trust and retention at scale.
When Data Exists but Decisions Still Fail
While most managers reported having timely access to HR data (82%) and finance data (75%), these systems rarely communicate with one another. The HiBob study found over three-fifths of people managers spend at least three hours pulling information from multiple platforms before making a single decision, and 15% spend more than five hours.
The downstream effects are significant. Thirty percent of managers say inadequate data access played a large or very large role in a high performer being underpaid or overlooked for recognition. Twenty-seven percent cite it as a factor in promoting someone before they were ready. Nearly a quarter report that pay budgets were misallocated as a result, while 29% blame missing or fragmented data for declines in team engagement or morale driven by perceived unfairness.
What makes this especially troubling is that managers are improvising rather than escalating issues. Almost two-thirds admit that when accessing the right HR or finance data feels too difficult, they make educated guesses instead of missing a deadline. Another 64% say role permissions or privacy controls limit their access to the data they reasonably need to perform their jobs well. This makes it difficult to justify pay-related decisions clearly.
Only 2% of managers currently have access to a unified HR and finance dashboard, leaving the vast majority to work across disconnected spreadsheets, tools, and legacy systems.
Concerns about consistency compound the problem. More than two-thirds of managers worry that similar roles are being evaluated using different metrics across teams, and 67% say they cannot ensure fair pay decisions without a unified view of people and financial data.
Fairness and Its Impact on Retention
The HiBob findings don’t exist in isolation. Separate research from Dayshape, published around the same time, underscores how fairness is becoming a critical retention lever, particularly as burnout continues to undermine growth.
The Dayshape report, “Inside the Leadership Growth Agenda,” surveyed 200 senior leaders at mid-to-large professional services firms across the UK and found that retention challenges are increasingly tied to fairness as a new frontier in leadership strategy.
Matt Cockett, CEO of Dayshape, frames the issue clearly:
“Fairness has shifted from a cultural aspiration to a strategic priority,”
he said. When workload distribution is unbalanced and utilization is treated as a crude planning metric rather than a holistic measure of capacity, retention suffers and growth stalls.”
Dayshape’s data suggests that a third of UK firms are quietly losing growth momentum because leadership can’t see where capacity is strained or where workloads are disproportionately concentrated.
The implication is that fairness, or perceived unfairness, in any form, whether workload, promotion, or pay, is a core issue to manage when addressing employee engagement.
Making Fairness an Essential Metric
Together, the HiBob and Dayshape research paint a consistent picture: fairness is no longer a soft metric. It’s a structural requirement for retention, performance, and growth. When organizations can’t answer basic questions about workload equity or pay consistency, they’re not just risking employee dissatisfaction—they’re risking competitive advantage.
Toby Hough, VP of People and Culture EMEA at HiBob, puts it plainly:
“As scrutiny on pay and progression increases, that gap is becoming impossible to ignore.”
Organizations that make fairness an integral part of their employee engagement strategies will gain a clear advantage over those that don’t.
