Why The Best Retention Strategy Is Training Managers To Talk About Money

When a company leaves pay entirely up to employees to bring up, it tends to believe it’s being neutral. Whoever advocates for themselves gets a conversation. Whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. What looks like an even playing field is actually a sorting mechanism, rewarding the confident and the well-coached while penalizing everyone who was taught not to ask, or who feared what would happen if they did. The result is an organization where two people doing the same job can have entirely different trajectories based on nothing more than who was comfortable raising their hand.

Ashley Paré is working to change that. She’s the founder of Own Your Worth, a leadership and negotiation coaching practice, and spent more than a decade in HR before moving to the other side of the table to coach employees, managers, and executives through the pay conversations most of them were never trained to have. Her core objection to the leave-it-to-the-employee default is that it outsources fairness to personality, and fairness delivered that way isn’t fair at all.

“The employee experience, if it’s not standardized, is really personally dependent. That impacts everyone’s ability to grow or stay long term at a company,” she says. Once advocacy becomes the deciding factor, the gap compounds in both directions, shaping not just who earns more but who believes they have a future worth staying for.

Inconsistency is the hidden cost

The damage isn’t limited to the employees who stay quiet. When advocacy drives outcomes, the inconsistency spreads across teams and becomes visible, then corrosive. Paré points out that the same dynamic plays out one level up, between managers. “If there’s one manager that advocates for their team and another manager who doesn’t, budget is awarded differently,” she says, and points out that employees notice. Someone whose manager doesn’t push on their behalf starts asking why, comparing their situation to peers on better-advocated teams, and reading the difference as a verdict on their worth. What began as an absence of process curdles into resentment.

That instability carries a measurable price. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Report found that the happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than their unhappiest counterparts. The effect is sharpest at smaller organizations, where a 25-to-75-person company with a negative happiness score sheds roughly 19 percentage points more of its workforce each year than its happiest peers. For a growing company, an inconsistent pay culture is imminent turnover accumulating in the background.

Managers are set up to fail

Part of why pay conversations go badly is that the people running them were handed the job with no preparation. Paré returns often to a structural gap: companies promote strong individual contributors into management and assume the rest takes care of itself. “Most managers get promoted without any type of training on how to have conversations around pay or performance,” she notes. “They were just good at their individual contributor jobs and they were promoted.” Dropped into compensation discussions without a framework, managers either avoid the topic or invent an answer on the spot.

The fix, in her view, starts above the manager. A company has to know its own pay philosophy first, “not based on the CEO’s relationship with money, but on the company’s pay-for-performance standards,” and then equip managers to explain it. When a manager actually understands how budget is allocated and what a given level requires, the conversation changes. Instead of guessing, they can tell an employee what growth looks like in concrete terms, giving the employee a real map rather than a vague hope.

Paré also wants managers to stop treating themselves as the sole decision-makers. Too many take it upon themselves to settle a number alone rather than asking HR for the pay bands, the external data, or the internal context that would make the call a sound one. 

HR as a resource, not a threat

That points to a broader misunderstanding Paré sees on both sides: the belief that HR is the adversary in a pay discussion rather than the resource. “A lot of people forget that HR is a resource for employees and for managers,” she says. Managers hesitate to ask whether a 12% increase is reasonable. Employees stay silent for fear of putting a target on their back. Both are leaving on the table the one function positioned to bring salary bands, leveling, and budget realities into the open. She traces the stigma to an outdated idea of HR as mere record-keepers, a holdover that still makes people flinch from conversations that would only give them better information.

Closing that gap, though, isn’t something a lone HR practitioner can will into being. Paré is direct that culture is set from the top, and an HR team of one can only move it so far without leadership behind them. “Their ability to shift culture or put into practice transparent pay policies completely depends on their relationship with leadership,” she asserts. Without buy-in, and without the business case that ties pay consistency to retention, the effort stalls, because the behavior won’t trickle down unless leaders hold managers accountable to it.

The retention paradox

The counterintuitive part of Paré’s experience is that teaching people to advocate sometimes ends with them leaving, but she views this as a win for everyone involved. She’s coached clients into raises of twenty, thirty, or forty thousand dollars where they were badly underpaid, but some finally raise the issue and still hear a ‘no,’ and the answer clarifies everything. “The real win is that gives them the permission to finally make a change that they might have been avoiding,” she says. A company that avoids these conversations doesn’t retain people so much as postpone their departure, while losing the chance to fix what might have kept them.

Handled openly, the same honesty that occasionally frees someone to leave is what keeps far more people engaged, because they can see a future and trust the system around them. The reason so many organizations never get there, Paré suggests, is simple avoidance. “We shy away from money conversations way too much when we go to work for pay in exchange for our time,” she says.