Pay Transparency, AI and Personalisation in Total Rewards: What Do Employees Really Want?

Insights From  Busola Farinmade, Total Rewards Director at Equinix

Pay transparency is fast becoming one of the hottest topics in reward. AI is changing how organisations design and deliver benefits at the same time. At the Engage Employee Summit, Busola Farinmade, Total Rewards Director at Equinix, explained how her team is handling both, and why fairness and employee value need to sit at the heart of each.

Global consistency, local delivery

Equinix runs data centres around the world, and it has grown rapidly through acquisitions. That growth has left a mix of reward practices inherited from the companies it has acquired. Busola describes her team’s mission as “global consistency but absolute local delivery and relevance”.

A big part of that work has been setting global minimum standards. Over the past few years, the team has defined the absolute minimum every employee should receive in compensation, medical cover, life insurance and leave, regardless of what local regulations require.

Busola is clear that this doesn’t happen overnight. She sees it as a five- to seven-year journey, and Equinix is roughly in year three. Plans to enhance parental leave, including a minimum of eight weeks’ paternity leave, were pushed back six months to allow time for stakeholder engagement. In a business where data centres must run 24/7, leaders naturally ask what it means to have people away for eight weeks. Answering those questions means explaining how leave fits into a wider view of employee wellbeing, and giving people time at the critical moments in their lives.

Pay transparency: more than compliance 

Much of today’s activity around pay transparency is driven by compliance, particularly as EU countries put the Pay Transparency Directive into local law. For Equinix, the bigger question was whether to introduce transparency only where the law requires it, or to take a global approach. That decision took around a year, as some countries worried it would “introduce chaos where it’s not needed”.

Busola’s view is that transparency isn’t a one-off event or simply a right to information. “It’s figuring out how to embed and how to weave equity [and] fairness into all aspects of pay decisions, hiring decisions, promotions, career pathways.” When fairness runs through the whole employee lifecycle, the conversation changes.

Starting with managers 

Rather than leading with policy, Equinix started with its managers. For three years, managers have been trained to hold reward conversations, with virtual workshops before and after each pay cycle. These even include role play on how to explain pay decisions and how they link to the company’s principles.

Last year, Equinix went further. It shared its merit pay guidelines with all employees, showing how performance translates into salary reviews, and explained exactly how company performance affects bonuses.

The results have been encouraging. Some feared the move would expose inconsistencies within teams. Instead, managers have been raising historical issues and asking for help to fix them, and employees are asking better questions. As Busola puts it, people may not always feel their pay matches the market, “but if employees are able to perceive that the process of pay decision-making is fair, maybe then that’s halfway through the journey.”

Employees’ sense of fairness has improved. The remaining challenge is recognition: with a stronger pay-for-performance message, employees want to know how well they are being differentiated from their peers.

AI: get the foundations right first 

On AI, Busola offers a refreshingly honest perspective. Like many reward teams, Equinix was quick to look at how AI could make processes faster and more efficient. However, the team was “stopped in its tracks” when it realised its information wasn’t well organised and some processes didn’t make sense. AI wasn’t going to fix that.

The team went back to the drawing board, running workshops to rethink its processes and the data that would feed any AI tool. Above all, it asked a question that often gets lost: how does this create value for the employee?

Her advice to other reward leaders is simple. Whatever you build with AI, from personalised benefits to reward statements generated in seconds, keep the employee experience and employee value at the centre.

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