Why You Shouldn’t Let Pay Become the Scoreboard

Sometimes when an employee asks for a raise, the ensuing conversation is simply about compensation.

But not always.

Research shows there’s a good chance the underlying problem that prompts salary frustrations is that employees have no way to track their progress.

Career issues accounted for one in five employee departures in 2025, according to Work Institute’s exit-interview data. That makes career development the top reason for turnover, while total rewards accounted for less than 8% of exits.

Pay obviously matters. The point is, it isn’t the only reason people decide they’re stuck.

A pay complaint may be about pay. It may also be a symptom of an organization that doesn’t give their employees any other way to keep score for where their career is headed.

A scoreboard is useful because it makes progress visible

After analyzing some 12,000 employee diary entries, a pair of Harvard researchers determined making progress on meaningful work had a far more profound effect on an employee’s motivation and day-to-day experience than incentives and compensation.

But, unlike salary, career growth isn’t measured by a tidy metric..

Clayton Alderfer’s Existence-Relatedness-Growth theory helps explain why that matters. Alderfer argued that when people struggle to satisfy less concrete needs, such as growth, they may turn toward needs that are easier to define.

“I’m becoming more capable and trusted at work” is subjective. “My salary went from $82,000 to $90,000” is not.

So someone who lacks opportunities for personal growth, or who lacks the language or tools to track that growth objectively, may turn to pay as a convenient proxy for progress and self-esteem.

That’s not to say the money itself isn’t a big deal, or a motivator in and of itself. But, when an organization gives employees few other ways to see career progress, compensation can become the scoreboard by default.

The scoreboard can’t tell you what the problem is

ERG isn’t an excuse to tell someone earning $20,000 below market that what they really need is personal fulfillment. The first step for HR is to rule out the obvious: is the person paid fairly?

Payscale’s 2025 Fair Pay Impact Report found a striking gap between what employees earned and what they believed their work was worth. Among employees earning above-market pay, 47% still thought they were underpaid. Among those paid at market, 63% felt the same way. 

For those employees at, or above, market rate, it’s worth considering whether their salary concerns are a symptom of other problems like:

• Org chart: They don't understand why their role sits at its current level or what separates it from the next one.
• Growth: They have no clear opportunity to develop or advance.
• Recognition: Their contribution has grown, but they receive little evidence that anyone has noticed.

If pay is fair and employees understand how it was determined, the answer isn’t to convince them to stop keeping score. It’s to give them more useful things to score. Namely: career structure, development, and recognition.

Give employees more ways to see progress

If pay is fair and employees understand how it was determined, the next question is whether they have any other way to tell that their career is moving forward.

Too often, they don’t.

Gallup reported that in 2024, only 45% of U.S. employees had participated in training or education to build skills for their current job. Among employees hoping to move into a new role within the next year, just 32% strongly agreed they had the skills they needed to excel in it.

Buffer, a popular social media management platform, ran into this problem in a particularly clear way. As a relatively small company, it couldn’t make management the only sign of career advancement. There simply weren’t enough management jobs for everyone who wanted to keep growing.

So Buffer built a career framework with larger Levels and smaller Steps within each level. Employees could move through four steps as they demonstrated greater ownership and initiative in their jobs without needing a new title every time they progressed.

Buffer later connected those steps to its salary framework, so employees no longer had to wait for a full promotion before their compensation could reflect their growth.

In other words, Buffer made it easier for employees to see progress. An employee should be able to see the skills they’ve gained, the responsibilities they’ve taken on, the level they’re working toward, and what they still need to demonstrate to get there. 

The last step is to make sure that employees feel that they’re not the only ones who see their improvement. They need to know the company recognizes their progress and contributions, too. 

Recognition gives employees a running score, not just a final result

Gallup and Workhuman describe recognition as a form of feedback that tells employees which contributions and behaviors their organization values. Their research found that 61% of employees who received both feedback and recognition from their manager at least weekly were engaged, compared with 38% of employees who received weekly feedback but less frequent recognition.

Google has put that principle into practice with its peer-bonus program. Employees can recognize a coworker who goes above and beyond with a small monetary reward, but the bonus also comes with a thank-you note shared with the recipient’s peers and managers. Google says the system is designed to reinforce the behaviors the company wants to see repeated.

A reward can mark the smaller milestones that formal compensation systems aren’t designed to capture. Paired with specific recognition, it gives employees another piece of evidence of their progress.

Build a better scoreboard

Employees are going to keep score. The problem starts when salary and title are the only numbers they can see.

A better system gives them more than one way to understand where they stand. Fair pay tells them what their work is worth. Job architecture shows them where they can go. Development helps them build the skills to get there. Recognition tells them that the progress they’re making along the way has been noticed

That’s where recognition tools like Giftly can play a useful role: not as a replacement for fair pay or career development, but as a way to mark the moments between promotions and raises that show an employee they’re moving forward.

Interested in seeing how to incorporate rewards into your company’s career development programs? Let’s talk.