HiBob research reveals UK firms claim fair pay decisions, yet most face challenges and appeal pay.
HiBob, the company behind Bob, the people management platform transforming how organisations work and helping businesses adapt to the age of AI, reveals a growing ‘fairness gap’ between how organisations make pay decisions – and how they are experienced, defended and trusted.
Despite 83% of people managers saying they can clearly justify pay and promotion decisions with supporting data, scrutiny of those decisions is widespread.
In the past 12 months, over three-quarters report decisions being formally challenged or appealed across promotion allocation (76%), setting or adjusting base pay (78%), and assigning performance ratings that influence pay (78%).
Employees are already paying the price
The fairness gap has consequences beyond dissatisfaction for employees. Over nine in 10 (93%) managers say a lack of timely and relevant people or financial data contributed to a negative team outcome over the past year. 30% say it played a large or very large role in a high performer being underpaid or under-recognised, while 27% say it contributed to a promotion being given before the individual was ready.
Others report wider business impacts, with 24% saying pay spend was misallocated, and 29% blaming data gaps for a decline in team engagement or morale driven by perceived unfairness or poor recognition.
Concerns about consistency underpin many of these outcomes. More than two-thirds (68%) of people managers worry that similar roles are evaluated using different metrics in different teams, and 67% say they cannot ensure fair pay decisions without a unified view of people and financial data.
Under pressure, fairness gives way to guesswork
The research shows the challenges with pay and promotion decisions are being caused not by a lack of data, but by a lack of effective data access.
While most managers have timely access to HR (82%) and finance data (75%), over half (61%) spend at least three hours assembling information from multiple systems before making people decisions – 15% take more than five hours.
As pressure builds, decision quality erodes. Almost two-thirds (65%) say when getting the right HR or finance data feels like too much of a hassle, they opt for an educated guess rather than miss a deadline. 64% say role permissions or privacy rules limit access to data they reasonably need.
Only 2% of managers currently have access to a unified HR and finance dashboard. This leaves most organisations to make people decisions across disconnected systems, tools and spreadsheets, without a shared source of truth.
Toby Hough, VP of People and Culture EMEA at HiBob, said, “Bringing HR and finance together has never been an easy brief.
“These teams work to different rhythms, different priorities, and often from different versions of the truth. But as scrutiny on pay and progression increases, that gap is becoming impossible to ignore.
“When people and financial data aren’t aligned, decisions take longer, feel harder to defend, and are far more likely to be challenged. Unifying that data doesn’t just make decisions faster – it makes them fairer. It gives leaders the confidence that the choices they’re making are in the best interests of both the business and their people, and that’s going to matter more than ever as we move into 2026 and beyond.”
