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If intention and responsibility could be at the heart of all decision making, how much more impact would your People team have on your organization? I bet it’s significant.  

What we know about productivity (and profitability) is that engaged teams accomplish more. They understand what to do, why what they do matters, how to accomplish it, and how progress is tracked and measured. The concept is straightforward—but implementation is far more nuanced.  

Starting Oct. 29th, employers with 25 or more employees in Massachusetts (public or private) are obligated to disclose a pay range within job postings to all applicants, and current employees upon request (among a few other components, all detailed here).  

Simple enough, right? Except, if there hasn’t been due diligence around the company’s internal pay bands and/or instances of inequity, disclosure requirements have the potential to rattle the organization. What happens when two people are being paid different salaries for the same role…and they both know it? Or when an employee realizes their compensation currently falls below the pay range for an open position? How committed could they be to stay engaged without a clear resolution in sight? Right-sizing compensation gaps and bringing current employees within pay bands represents a significant undertaking from an organizational development and people-management point of view—not to mention the cost.  

The layers of operationalizing a seemingly simple mandate are quite complicated. It’s made easier if you’re working with an organization that upholds the expense of the integrity to be planful, transparent, and limit the unintentional impact of a change like this. These mandates feel less cumbersome and more an amplification of why it’s important to do the right thing by people: keep intention and responsibility at the heart of decision-making. Pay transparency is good for building engaged workforces.  

The DNA of LabCentral is about empowering breakthroughs together. We believe in a world where life-changing therapies can reach patients faster through the radical support of science, business, and people.  

We spend our days entrenched in labs, ensuring our tools and spaces work seamlessly and without friction. We go above and beyond to cultivate an environment ripe for innovation, entrepreneurship, and scientific advancement.  

We have deep-seated belief in the evergreen values that inform our organizational decisioning—and one of those core principles is ‘continuous innovation.’ After all, our investment in ‘people’ is 1/3 of the structural pillars on which we continue to build.  

It was back in 2022 that we decided to assess our internal people processes and calibrate our findings against industry benchmarks. We realized what has now been codified into Massachusetts state law through the Wage Transparency Act: pay transparency helps close the gaps for unintentional pay disparity.  

We laid out a plan to make incremental, intentional corrective actions to align compensation based on objective stratification of roles and levels. We began publishing the compensation range in every job description so that from the first moment of interest in a role with LabCentral, applicants know their pay range associated with the position. 

Closing unintentional pay gaps preserves the intention and responsibility that the People Strategy & Culture function brings to the organization as it nurtures culture and advances the group. Transparency signals fairness: clear and consistent pay structures reduce uncertainty and resentment about compensation. When the deal feels fair, it helps us move toward goals with ambition and determination. We focus more on the mechanisms of engagement, impact, problem solving– and less on the organizational corrosion and performance hindrances caused by inequities (either perceived or real).