IMW Industries Ltd.

Mali Lombard

Compensation Equity Advocate

Why getting pay right is the base of employee trust and retention

I come from a country where we paid people on the 25th and survived load shedding (scheduled rolling blackouts). When the power went off, payroll ran on a laptop battery and a prayer. Then I moved to Canada and met biweekly pay, CPP, EI and stat holidays that change depending on which province you are standing in.

The culture shock was real. My IRP5 became a T4, UIF became EI, and I needed a translator for the acronyms long before I needed one for my accent.

But one thing did not change when I crossed the ocean. In any country, the pay stub is the one HR message every employee reads closely, every single time.

I learned just how closely at a backyard barbecue one summer. When a guest heard I worked in HR, he took a folded printout from his jacket: his own employer’s job posting, with the pay range circled in red pen. The new hire would start on more than he earned after eight years with the company. “Sorry,” he said, “but could you help me understand this?” From a Canadian, that is a formal complaint in triplicate. He wasn’t my employee, but it was clear he had already started looking for his next job.

Every HR team knows the feeling. You craft the perfect all-staff email, and it gets fewer reads than the notice about the broken microwave.  The pay stub has no such problem. Nobody skims it, and nobody saves it for later. Employees who have never opened a policy update can tell you their net pay to the cent. And now they have something to compare it with.

“No recognition program, wellness app or pizza Friday can make up for a pay stub that says they are worth less than the market does.”

Since November 2023, every public job posting in B.C. has had to show the pay or a pay range. Employers with 50 or more staff must also publish a pay transparency report by 1 November 2026. Your job ads, your competitors’ job ads and your own report are a few clicks away, and your employees are clicking. With the ubiquitous social media, computer literacy and now AI, employees are more capable than ever to compare real salary data.

The pay stub used to be a private letter. Now it is a report card, and everyone knows what an A looks like. Which raises an awkward question: what happens when yours is a C?

Underpaying is the most expensive saving

It is tempting to treat a lower wage as a win for the budget. The catch is that Canadians are far too polite to complain about pay. They simply, politely, leave, and you get a lovely farewell card.

When they go, the saving goes with them. We pay to recruit a replacement, usually at the market rate we were trying to avoid. We pay in lost productivity while the new person learns the job, and in overtime for the colleagues covering the gap. We pay in the loss of good employees, who usually are the first to leave for this reason, and the positive benefits they have on their colleagues.

Employees will put up with a lot at work. But no recognition program, wellness app or pizza Friday can make up for a pay stub that says they are worth less than the market does. Every two weeks they receive that fresh grievance memo.

Lessons from learning payroll twice

Learning a pay system from scratch again, taught me three rules about paying people fairly.

1. Benchmark before people resign. Check your pay against the market at least once a year, not only when someone hands in a resignation letter with a competing offer attached.

2. Watch for pay compression. When starting rates go up, look at what your loyal staff earn. Few things damage trust faster than a veteran training a newcomer who earns more.

3. Explain how pay is set. People accept a lot when they understand the ranges, the steps and what it takes to move up. Secrecy breeds suspicion, and a clear structure builds trust.

Canadians are remarkably patient people. I have watched them sit through a two-sailing wait at the BC Ferries terminal without a single complaint, and cheer for their hockey team through an entire losing season. But that patience has a limit, and it is usually printed on the pay stub.

Pay is the one topic where a Canadian’s “sorry” comes with a spreadsheet attached. So, treat the paycheque like a Tim Hortons order: get it right the first time, every time, or hear about it before the double-double cools.

Do that, and the only thing circled in red will be the next long weekend on the calendar.