Can Your HR Tech Handle Transparency?

The EU Pay Transparency Directive isn’t just a new layer of reporting. It’s a direct challenge to the systems, structures and assumptions many organisations still rely on when it comes to pay – especially those with fragmented data and inconsistent job architecture across countries.
At its core, the directive demands that businesses can justify how they pay people. Not just at the point of hiring, but on an ongoing basis. That means being able to compare roles fairly, identify pay gaps without resorting to spreadsheets, and respond to employee queries with clarity, not caveats.
And if your HR tech can’t support that, you’ve got a problem.

Functionality isn’t the issue – configuration is

Plenty of platforms already have the bones of what’s needed. Dayforce, Workday, SAP – they’re built to handle complex workforce data across geographies. But in our work with clients, we consistently find that the issue isn’t whether the tech can do it. It’s whether it’s set up to do it in a way that reflects your people strategy and makes compliance manageable.

If your system hasn’t been configured with pay transparency in mind – or worse, hasn’t been touched since implementation – it won’t serve you when this directive kicks in. And patching things together in a panic won’t be good enough when regulators – or your employees – start asking questions.

Pay transparency is a data problem disguised as a policy one

This is where a lot of organisations go wrong. They treat pay transparency as a comms or compliance issue, when in fact it’s a structural one. If your roles aren’t clearly defined and classified, if your pay bands don’t map cleanly to job titles, if your data is held across three systems and six spreadsheets then transparency becomes guesswork.

You cannot report on what you cannot see. And you certainly can’t justify pay decisions if your systems don’t retain the rationale behind them.

The directive doesn’t just require you to hold the data. It expects you to understand it, interrogate it, and act on it. HR tech should enable that. If it’s not, then it’s time to ask why you’re still using it in its current form.

Hospitality adds a layer of complexity – but not an excuse

For hospitality businesses in particular, this gets more complicated. Role titles vary from site to site. Central systems often struggle to reflect local pay agreements. And temporary or seasonal contracts create significant variability.

But none of that exempts you from compliance. In fact, it increases your exposure. Because where there’s inconsistency, there’s risk, both in terms of audits and in terms of employee trust.

If your HR system isn’t built to reflect how your business really operates (with structured job hierarchies, banded roles, and robust data flows between payroll and HR) you’re already on the back foot. And no amount of process documentation will fix that.

This is the moment to get ahead – or fall behind

Right now, you’ve still got time. But not as much as you think.

Getting your HR tech ready for pay transparency isn’t a quick fix. It’s a piece of work – and a meaningful one. It requires thoughtful reconfiguration, alignment across teams, and in some cases, a shift in mindset about how job architecture and compensation frameworks are managed.

The good news? You don’t need to do it alone. We’ve helped businesses across hospitality, finance and tech reframe their systems around compliance, not just administration. We don’t recommend platforms – we work with what you’ve already got, and we make it better.

Because the risk isn’t just getting this wrong on paper. It’s damaging employee trust, failing to meet legal requirements, and spending more time explaining than solving.

This directive isn’t going away. And it’s not waiting for your systems to catch up.

Now is the time to ask the difficult questions. Are your systems doing what you think they are? Can they deliver what this directive demands? And if not what’s your plan?