The “HR Day 2025 – Innovative Strategies for Retail” was an opportunity to take the pulse of a sector still affected by labor shortages. Throughout the day, transparency was discussed as a lever for attraction, but also talent retention. Explanations.
When Sarah Jodoin-Houle, founder of La Talenterie, wants to convince a leader of the importance of being transparent with employees, she shows a small comparative study she conducted with two clients.
On one side, company A that paid its employees above market rate, but communicated little or poorly about its salary structure. On the other, company B that paid its employees below market rate, but had a communication strategy in place.
Surprisingly, 80% of company B’s employees thought they were paid “at market” or “slightly above market”! This speaks volumes about the damage that a company’s opacity regarding its salary policy can cause.
Sarah Jodoin-Houle explains:
If you don’t take control of this conversation, people will form their own perception in their head. They will talk about it among themselves, they will talk about it anyway.
This doesn’t mean you should jump without a safety net, the consultant specifies:
Before practicing salary transparency, you need to clean up your practices. If we have lots of inequity and we can’t answer questions, it might not be time to display salary scales on the cafeteria walls.
A magnet for talents
During HR Day, the transparency argument also emerged in workforce attraction strategies. To attract new players to the team, there’s no point in promising the moon – candidates aren’t fooled. It’s better to highlight the company’s true “DNA,” with complete transparency.
We want to be a magnet for the talents we’re looking for, illustrates Renée-Claude Paris, co-founder and president of SISMIK Culture d’impact. If the people we recruit don’t value what we have to offer, we won’t have a good retention rate.
Renée-Claude Paris helps companies establish an “employee value proposition” (EVP) that is realistic and actually experienced in the company.
Authenticity means making choices, she explained during the conference “Authenticity at the heart of the employer brand.” We can’t be everything or offer everything. In an industry as competitive as retail, you have to be able to stand out from other stores or industry players. You have to do it with authenticity, realistically with what we’re able to offer, she testifies.
To identify their competitive advantage, she advises companies to look for the answer among their most loyal employees.
What I like to do when I conduct a company values audit is to sit people together in a workshop, then ask them to share their stories, their lived experiences. Do you have a good memory in the organization? You have people work in subgroups and they will share lots of stories with you. This will put words to what is really experienced in the organization.
Salary transparency and transparency of company experience, these are two avenues to explore to navigate through the turbulent period in the market.
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