How to get off to a good start with Opacity

When a company begins its journey toward pay transparency, it is rarely just about purchasing a system.

It is about getting a handle on data, job architecture, pay structure, and the way pay decisions are made.

That is why the onboarding process in Opacity is built around one purpose: to create a solid foundation that the company can use for compliance, pay analysis, and ongoing compensation management.

Because if the foundation is not in place, the rest becomes difficult.

It starts with data

The first step is to get employee and salary data into Opacity.

This can be done via integration with your HR and payroll systems or via upload, depending on your setup. The goal is to gather the most important data in one place so that you can work from a common and updated foundation.

Typically, this involves information such as department, manager, job title, employment date, working hours, gender, base salary, pension, bonus, allowances, and other compensation elements.

It sounds simple, but in practice, payroll data is often more complex than many think.

There may be different pay types, historical agreements, part-time employments, bonus schemes, pensions, variable allowances, and employees who do not fit neatly into existing categories.

Therefore, importing data is only the first step. The most important part is understanding what the data actually shows.

Data must be validated before it can be used

Once data is imported, we review the data foundation together.

The purpose is to ensure that the pay analysis is based on correct and meaningful information. This is particularly important because working with pay transparency requires companies to be able to document and explain pay gaps on a solid foundation.

In this phase, we look, among other things, at whether all relevant employees are included, whether some should be excluded from the analysis, whether the necessary fields are completed, and whether salary elements are categorized correctly.

This is also where the company must decide what "pay" means in the analyses.

Is it base salary? Is pension included? What about bonuses, flexible benefits, allowances, and other variable pay elements? Should part-time employees be normalized? And how do we ensure that employees are compared on a fair basis?

It is not always difficult, but it requires precision.

Job architecture is the foundation for comparison

Once the data foundation is in place, the next step is the job architecture.

Job architecture is about creating a structure for what jobs exist in the organization and how they relate to one another.

This is a prerequisite for comparing pay in a meaningful way. If you only compare based on job titles, you quickly risk comparing employees who actually have different responsibilities, levels, or tasks.

In Opacity, the job architecture can be built around job families, job functions, job tracks, and job levels.

This makes it possible to group employees by the job itself — not just by title, department, or historical designations.

This is often where many companies spot something important. The existing structure is not always as clear as they thought. The same title can cover different roles. Different titles can cover the same type of work. And pay practices can vary across teams, even when the tasks are similar.

Job architecture makes it possible to create a common language for roles, responsibilities, and levels.

Employees must be mapped correctly

Once the job architecture is created, employees must be mapped into the structure.

This means that each employee is linked to the relevant job family, job function, relevant job track, and job level.

This is not an evaluation of the employee's performance. It is an evaluation of the job.

That is an important distinction.

Job mapping is about understanding the role the employee holds: responsibility, complexity, requirements, and tasks. Therefore, HR will often make an initial proposal, which is then validated together with relevant managers.

Managers play an important role because they know the work in practice. They can help ensure that the structure not only looks right in a spreadsheet but also reflects the reality of the organization.

Salary bands make pay easier to explain

Once the job architecture and mapping are in place, the company can begin working with salary bands.

Salary bands provide a clear framework for what pay should typically be for a specific role and a specific level.

This makes it easier to see if an employee is within, below, or above the expected pay range. It also makes it easier to make more consistent decisions regarding new hires, salary adjustments, and promotions.

A salary band typically consists of a minimum, midpoint, and maximum. You can also work with principles like compa-ratio and clear rules for how salary bands should be used in practice.

Salary bands are not an answer key. But they provide a common framework.

And that framework is crucial if managers and HR are to explain compensation in a way that is perceived as fair and transparent.

The first pay analysis shows where to focus

Once data, job architecture, and salary bands are set up, the first pay analysis can be conducted.

Here, the company can begin to see patterns and discrepancies in pay.

The analysis can show, among other things, the unadjusted pay gap, the adjusted pay gap, pay gaps between genders, differences across job families and job levels, gender distribution, salary quartiles, and employees who lie below or above the salary bands.

The adjusted pay gap is particularly important because it accounts for the job structure. This provides a more accurate picture than simply comparing all employees across the company.

The goal is not to create panic over every single number.

The goal is to identify the areas that require closer analysis, explanation, or action.

Management must be involved early

Pay transparency is not just an HR task.

Once the first analyses are ready, the results should be reviewed with the relevant decision-makers. This could include HR leadership, Finance, executive management, Compensation & Benefits, legal or compliance officers, and relevant business leaders.

This is important because pay is not just data. Pay is also about economics, leadership, culture, communication, and trust.

Management must understand the results, the risk areas, and the decisions that need to be made. This could relate to how pay gaps should be explained, whether salary bands need to be adjusted, whether the job architecture needs calibration, or how the organization should communicate internally.

The earlier management is involved, the easier it becomes to establish direction and ownership.

Managers must be able to explain pay

Managers play a central role in the work with pay transparency.

It is often the managers who must validate employees' positions within the job architecture. And it is also the managers who will later need to be able to explain pay decisions to employees.

Therefore, they should not just be involved at the very end.

A good onboarding process ensures that managers understand the purpose, the structure, and their role. They must be able to distinguish between job mapping, performance, and pay. They must understand how salary bands are used. And they must know how to handle questions from employees.

This does not require all managers to become experts in pay analysis. But it requires them to be properly equipped.

Communication is part of the implementation

When a company begins to work more systematically with job architecture, salary bands, and pay transparency, questions will arise.

This is natural.

Employees will want to understand what the process means for them. Managers will want to know what to say. HR needs to be able to explain why this work is being initiated, and what it is not about.

Therefore, internal communication is an important part of the onboarding process.

A good communication plan makes it clear why the company is working on pay transparency, what job architecture means, what employees can expect, and who they can turn to with questions.

It is especially important to explain that job architecture and mapping do not automatically result in a salary change, promotion, or performance evaluation.

It is first and foremost about creating structure and a more accurate foundation for future decisions.

The customer's role in the onboarding process

Opacity helper with the platform, structure, analyses, and Sparring.

But a successful onboarding also requires internal involvement from the customer.

The company typically needs to contribute access to relevant salary and HR data, clarification of data definitions, input for the job architecture, validation of employee mappings, decisions on salary bands and compensation principles, involvement of relevant managers, and internal communication.

The clearer roles and responsibilities are from the start, the smoother the process will be.

It is not a requirement that everything is finished before you begin. On the contrary, the onboarding process is designed to help the company structure the work step by step.

How long does it take?

The duration of onboarding depends on the size of the organization, data quality, and complexity.

A simple setup can often be completed relatively quickly. Larger organizations with multiple entities, countries, pay types, job families, and management layers typically require more time for validation and calibration.

The most important thing is not to get through it as quickly as possible.

The most important thing is to build a foundation that can be used going forward — for compliance, reporting, and ongoing compensation management.

From data to better pay decisions

The onboarding process in Opacity helps companies go from raw HR and payroll data to a structured foundation for pay analysis, salary bands, reporting, and data-driven pay decisions.

Once the process is complete, the company does not just have a system set up.

It has a better foundation for understanding pay, explaining pay gaps, and working more systematically with fair and transparent pay.

That is where the value lies.

Not in the setup itself, but in the foundation it creates for the decisions that follow.