#51 - How to Communicate Pay Equity Goals with Special Guest Marcus Priest from Novartis

In this week’s Coffee Talk, Henrike von Platen of Fair Pay Innovation Lab speaks with Marcus Priest, Head of Global R&D Rewards at Novartis, about communicating the pledge to become a fair pay organization. Listen to Novartis’ success story in this episode of the Coffee Talk with Planet Fair to learn more about how to build an internal communications strategy to support pay transparency—even across countries, continents, cultures—and to integrate a pay equity mindset into your organizational culture.

Co-creation and inclusive communication underpin pay equity goals

When Novartis began their work around their Equal Pay International Coalition (EPIC) commitment, they divided their attention among hard (benchmarks) and soft (communication) deliverables to underpin the momentum of the initiative. Communication, it turned out, was one of the first and most important steps: Equipping their managers with the skills they needed to speak with employees, including communications support, and bringing managers into the communications content creation process strengthened company-wide employee engagement.

“The success of our work [came] through communication and engagement because, particularly with pay transparency,” Marcus explains, “we took a holistic approach to think about the different audiences that we had, [including] HR leaders, senior leaders, the sponsors of our work—and line managers that were having the conversations, and our employees.”

Listen to the coffee talk to hear more about Novartis’ global success story in this edition of Coffee Talk with Planet Fair.

Friday Coffee Talk from Planet Fair is a podcast/videocast series co-hosted by PayAnalytics founder Margrét Bjarnadóttir and Henrike Von Platen, founder and CEO of the FPI Fair Pay Innovation Lab in Berlin. It is available through all podcast platforms as well as on YouTube as a videocast.