USA 
United Kingdom
HR leaders are increasingly responsible for decisions tied to pay, growth, and cost control, yet many say they are slowed by limited data and ongoing challenges around fairness. Kenneth Matos, Director of Market Intelligence at HiBob, offers five workarounds to make equitable choices despite not having a complete picture...
1. Use unified HR and finance data to make more informed choices
HR leaders can make better decisions when they have a clear view of both workforce and financial data. This includes understanding how talent moves through the organization, how performance and productivity affect outcomes, and how compensation and development investments align with business priorities. It also means providing decision makers with insight into how employees with similar talents and contributions are being rated and rewarded. Leaders also need to know where skills gaps exist and how turnover affects teams and budgets. Having this connected insight helps leaders make decisions that support both employees and the business and create a sense of fairness and procedural justice that reinforce engagement.
2. Look to the long term
Deciding who should participate in paid development opportunities is always a challenge. The best approach is to look at readiness and long-term impact. Employees who are prepared to take full advantage of an opportunity, whether it’s speaking, training, or representing the company externally, tend to get the most value. Another important factor is the ability to scale their learnings to support their colleagues. Employees who return from training and are able to effectively share what they have learned improve the overall team. A “train the trainer” approach also avoids situations where external training improves one employee who is blocked from applying those skills by teammates beholden to old ways of working.
3. Don't second guess
To be honest, organizations can’t make better decisions without unified people and finance data. HR leaders are often left guessing where to invest in employee development or what budgets allow for professional growth and culture initiatives. Without it, it’s difficult to balance employee needs with business priorities.
If unified data isn’t available, even partial visibility is better than guessing. Leaders can start by making small, practical improvements. This could mean creating shared dashboards between HR and finance or prioritizing the most critical metrics. In addition, emphasize shared language and standards for how you structure data as well as training on how to use cross-functional tools. This makes data gathering easier and faster and reduces time lost explaining where needed data is hiding or how different data sets relate to one another.
4. Set your budgets
HR leaders need clear financial guardrails because, without them, alignment with business priorities are unclear, making even the best HR strategies harder to execute. Knowing what is available to spend, what it can be spent on, and how best to justify a request enables people to make better informed decisions. Such guardrails enable HR leaders to abandon low-value long-shot projects, get easy wins approved quickly, and invest their time in projects that are medium to high value and effort.
If clear guardrails aren’t yet in place, organizations can start by defining priority budgets and approval processes for key initiatives. Clearly communicated rules give HR leaders a framework to make decisions confidently and reduce guesswork. Companies can begin with a few guardrails and strengthen them over time, but the important thing is to start.
5. Make smart use of AI in performance reviews
AI can make performance reviews more consistent and fair, but it’s not a replacement for human judgment. I advise coaching managers to use a voice to text tool to transcribe their thoughts about an employee in response to their organization’s performance review template. They can take those free thoughts and place them into an AI tool to convert them into performance review appropriate statements that managers can review. They can also ask AI for suggestions on what evidence they would help support those statements and go back to their hopefully unified HR and Finance data along with 1:1 notes to provide that content, which AI can integrate into their draft. That review can then be fed to AI again to help them script or even rehearse difficult conversations. The key is not to replace the manager with AI, but to reduce the barrier to quality reviews by lowering the native feedback skills the manager needs and providing examples of quality that can help them deliver consistently better feedback to their teams.
