Rampant pay cynicism threatens employers: Marsh
- More than four in 10 workers think leaving and rejoining beats staying for raises.
- That share was 18% in 2024.
- 92% of investors would cut investment over employee pay issues.
- Only 26% of HR leaders have implemented skills-based pay.
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — More than four in 10 workers now believe they are more likely to get a raise by leaving their company and rejoining it than by staying, a level of pay cynicism that threatens employers’ ability to hold on to the staff they have and to keep investors on side.
Workers doubt staying pays off
The share has more than doubled from 18% in 2024, according to a report from professional services company Marsh cited by HR Dive.
Ninety-two percent of investors said they would “reduce or eliminate investment in firms with employee pay issues,” the report found.
Paired with a “depleted and disengaged” workforce, Marsh said, “this trend is systematically undermining trust in reward systems.”
“We are seeing a breakdown in the contract between employers and employees,” said Gordon Frost, global rewards leader at Marsh. “A depleted workforce paired with cynicism about pay creates a precarious moment for employers.”
Skills-based pay lags HR leaders’ own beliefs
“Employees are exhausted, they don’t believe the system is fair, and the moment the job market improves, they will leave,” Frost said.
Nearly three-quarters of human resources (HR) leaders said skills-based pay drives retention, yet only 26% have actually implemented it.
Just 31% of employees said they believed they would be compensated for upskilling, while workers who feel fairly paid report being 85% more engaged and 60% more committed.
Marsh recommended auditing job architectures, creating clear paths for skills-based pay, ensuring pay transparency and restructuring management responsibilities toward development instead of administrative tasks, and it warned of “a widening gap between executives’ expectations for talent strategy and HR teams’ legacy approaches.”
The same retention math applies to offshore outsourcing teams, since business process outsourcing (BPO) operators also lose trained staff when workers doubt that building skills will raise their pay. When pay feels arbitrary, attrition rises, which makes a provider’s reward structure worth probing for any buyer comparing the top BPO companies worldwide.
Marsh’s findings confirm that pay cynicism has become an investor concern and a retention risk, not only an HR problem.
For enterprise buyers running offshore teams, a provider’s approach to pay transparency and skills-based rewards is a practical measure of how stable that team will be.
BPO operators that tie pay to verified skills are positioned to keep trained staff when the job market turns.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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