You have a philosophy. You have ranges. Finance has signed off. Everyone is feeling the exhaustion of the body of work and wants to race to the finish. Resist all temptation to rush to market.Step 7 is the audit phase: confirming the mapping of every team member against the new
structure before anything goes live. What you find is almost always a mix: some people sitting well below the minimum, some well above the maximum, and a distribution that tends to prompt the same first question from leadership every time: "Did we level them correctly?"
That question is not a deflection. It's the right question. Before you treat any outlier as a compensation problem, go back to the level definitions and decide. Sometimes the adjustment isn't a pay correction at all, rather a simple leveling correction. Getting this right before launch matters, because fixing a mis-leveling after the fact is a much harder conversation and will have team members questioning the validity of the entire exercise.
Once you'veconfirmed the leveling is sound and the numbers are correct, the path forward depends on where someone sits.
For people below range (typically below .8 comp ratio), the goal is to close the gap and close it quickly. This can be done in one correction or carefully phased, with natural moments being mid-year or
annual review cycles, but the urgency is real. Managers are generally eager to get their people caught up. They understand what it signals when someone is underpaid and they know it.
For people above range (typically above 1.1 compa ratio), the conversation shifts to promotional readiness. Are they performing at the next level or close to it where a level change is available soon? If yes, the path is clear. If not, the approach is compression over time: no large increases until the range catches up to where they are. Managers are far less comfortable with this one, as it requires them to have a direct conversation about where someone stands without a promotion on the horizon, which is exactly the kind of conversation most managers would prefer to avoid.
While you're working through the corrections, don't wait to build your launch materials. These include: level rubrics, pay bands, manager training materials, and FAQs.
Once all the work is ready, it is time to move to the long-awaited Step 8, the launch.
The most common failure point isn't the structure. It's the manager conversation. Specifically, it's managers who were in the room for the leveling process suddenly having no memory of it when a team member pushes back on their outcome. "I had nothing to do with these decisions" is a direct quote I have heard more than once from someone who was, in fact, very much involved.
What can mitigate this is preparation. Managers need to be able to articulate how decisions were made,
not just what the outcome was. Training sessions, open office hours, manager 1:1s, and a well constructed FAQ go a long way. When a manager can walk a team member through the process clearly and confidently, the conversation lands differently. When they can't, they point fingers and the credibility of the entire program takes the hit.
If your leaderscan't own the message and defend the work, the launch will fail. It is as simple as that. Do pay particular attention to the uptake of information and spend extra time where manager support is needed.
The launch is not the end, rather the beginning. Step 9 is what happens to keep the system alive, current, and relevant via ongoing iteration.
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