Pay structures without a strategy: what happens in rapidly growing companies

When a company grows quickly, pay decisions are often made one at a time, frequently under pressure. An employee receives an offer from a competitor, and the company intervenes to retain them. A hard-to-fill position is closed only by increasing the offer. A long-serving employee gets a raise because they have ‘long deserved it’. Each of these choices makes sense in isolation. The problem arises when someone tries to look at them all together.

How pay disparities become embedded

Individual pay rises accumulate over time, often in the form of a superminimo (an individual pay supplement above the collective-agreement minimum) that increases with each negotiation. Those who have asked for more, or have received an external offer, find themselves ahead of those who have never raised the issue. Counter-offers, in particular, tend to reward those who were prepared to leave more than those who stayed without discussion.

Meanwhile, the market moves on. New hires join on terms aligned with the current market, which are sometimes higher than those of colleagues with more experience in the same role. This phenomenon is known as pay compression: the gap between different levels of seniority narrows, or even inverts, without anyone having intended it.

The delayed consequences

Information about salaries circulates more than companies might think. When an employee discovers they earn less than a newly arrived colleague, they rarely say so immediately. More often, they disengage, look for other opportunities, or arrive at their annual review with a firm demand. Long-serving employees, who helped build the company in more difficult times, experience these disparities as a lack of recognition.

There is also a less visible effect: it becomes impossible to respond to requests coherently. Without a clear framework, every approved raise sets a precedent, and every denied raise seems arbitrary. With the evolution of European legislation on pay transparency, the ability to explain differences using objective criteria will become increasingly important, even for medium-sized businesses.

The role of the superminimo

The superminimo is the most common tool for personalising pay, and for this reason, it is where inconsistencies accumulate. Amounts decided at different times, with absorption rules that are not always clear, make it difficult to understand how much of a person's pay is tied to their role versus their individual history. This topic is explored in more detail in our article on the superminimo supplement.

Rebuilding internal consistency

Restoring order does not mean aligning everyone with a single drastic intervention, which is usually neither sustainable nor advisable. It means, first and foremost, mapping the current situation: who does what, at which level, and with what total compensation, including fixed and variable elements. This analysis alone often reveals disparities that no one could previously explain.

The next step is to define reference criteria for key roles: what levels exist within the same role, which salary band is consistent with each, and how employees progress from one to the next. On this basis, a gradual realignment can be planned. The company can decide how to manage cases that fall outside the defined bands and build a bonus system that does not simply compensate for imbalances in fixed pay.

The result is not a rigid grid. It is the ability for the company to make its next pay decision with a full understanding of the implications for everyone else.