Why your best reward work keeps getting lost in translation

You know that moment. You've spent weeks - maybe months - getting the pay structure right. The job evaluation is methodologically sound. The salary bands are defensible. The pay equity analysis is clean. You've documented everything. You're proud of the work, and you should be.

Then you check in with the client two weeks later and discover the employee announcement has been rewritten by someone who attended one briefing call and half-read your summary deck.

"We’ve made sure people doing the same jobs are paid the same." When you’ve spent weeks evaluating different roles (e.g., a female-dominated admin role and a male-dominated technical role) to ensure equal pay for work of equal value. 

"We benchmark our salaries against the external market to make sure our pay is competitive." When you’ve built a pay structure based on objective, gender-neutral criteria, carefully advising the client that ‘market rate’ alone is no longer a legally defensible excuse for a pay gap under the PTD.

The manager talking points - which you didn't actually write, because nobody asked you to - don't exist. Instead, managers got a two-line email from HR saying "you may receive questions about pay, please direct them to the People team."

And now three employees have submitted pay information requests, a line manager has told someone in a one-to-one that: "I think you're probably underpaid but my hands are tied." And the CHRO is wondering why the project that cost five figures hasn’t quite landed how they expected.

This keeps happening

Talk to any independent reward consultant long enough and a version of this story comes out. The details might change, but the pattern doesn't.

While the technical work is strong, the communication falls apart. And because the communication is what employees actually see and hear, that's what shapes their experience of the whole thing. 

Nobody in the organisation is going to say "well, the job evaluation methodology was excellent." They're going to say "that pay transparency thing was a mess." Which is maddening, because it wasn't. The reward work was good. It just didn’t reach people in a form they could understand.

Why it goes wrong

Three things tend to happen, sometimes all at once.

1 - the handoff gap

You deliver the technical work and step back. The client's HR team is supposed to "sort out the comms." But they're already stretched across six other priorities, they don't have deep reward fluency, and writing clear employee-facing copy about complex pay structures isn't something most HR generalists have been trained to do. 

So it gets done late, done quickly, or done by someone who wasn't close enough to the work to get the nuance right.

2 - the internal comms rewrite

When an internal comms team does get involved, they bring real skill in tone, readability, and employee engagement. But they often lack the technical grounding to know which words matter and which ones are just jargon. So they simplify. And sometimes that simplification changes the meaning. "Work of equal value" is a legal term with a specific definition under the EU Pay Transparency Directive. "Similar roles" is not the same thing. That distinction matters when an employee gets confused about their comparators and starts to mistrust the process.

3 - the missing manager layer

Managers are the people employees actually talk to about pay. Not HR. Not you, the reward consultant. And in most reward projects, nobody gives the manager anything useful. Maybe a brief email. Maybe a slide deck that was designed for the board and repurposed badly. Managers end up improvising, which means every employee gets a slightly different version of the story, and some of those versions are wrong.

The bit that stings

Here's what makes this particularly frustrating for independent consultants. When the communication fails, it doesn't just affect the client. It affects your reputation.

You're a small operation and your name is on the work. When a client's pay transparency programme lands badly with employees, nobody's going to trace the problem back to the comms (or lack of). They're going to associate the outcome with your project. 

And the next time that client needs reward work, they might think twice. Not because your analysis was wrong - it wasn't - but because the whole thing felt like it didn't quite work.

That's the cost of the translation gap. It's not just a communication problem. It's a commercial one.

So whose job is communication?

This is the question. Most reward consultants would say communications aren't their responsibility. And technically, they're right. You were hired to do the analytical work, and you did it well.

But you're also the person who understands the methodology better than anyone else. You know why the job evaluation was structured the way it was. You know which pay gaps are explainable and which need remediation. You know what "work of equal value" actually means and why it can't be casually paraphrased.

That knowledge is exactly what good reward communication needs to be built on. Without it, you get well-intentioned - but technically shaky - messaging that creates more problems than it solves.

I'm not suggesting every reward consultant should become a copywriter or a designer. That's a different skill set entirely. But pretending the communication piece will sort itself out after you leave - that's not working either. And most of us know it.

What reward consultants keep telling me

I talk to independent reward consultants regularly. The same observations come up again and again. They know the comms gap exists. They've lived it on multiple projects. Some have tried to fill it themselves by writing employee FAQs at midnight, cobbling together manager talking points between client calls. But it's not their strongest work and it takes far longer than it should.

What they want is a way to make sure the communication matches the quality of the reward work, without having to build that capability from scratch inside a one- to-three person practice.

That's a solvable problem. But it starts with acknowledging that the translation gap is real, it's costing you and your clients, and hoping the client's internal team will handle it is a strategy that keeps failing.

I'm Becky Hewson-Haworth, founder of Clarion Call Communications. I help reward consultants and HR leaders turn complex pay and reward work into clear, accurate communications that actually land. 

Connect with me or drop me a message - I'm always interested in how other consultants handle the reward communications challenge. Or find out more about what the solution actually looks like in my next piece.