Roast the Post: Grounds for Discussion
Grounds for Discussion delivers a short, unfiltered analysis on the headlines shaping organizations and the world of work. In each episode, Jen and Paul dissect one key story with sharp, bullsh*t-free insights. No fluff, just the deep dives that workplace professionals need to stay ahead of the curve.
Sources
A note on sources: the report which this headline and context comes from is now paywalled. Rather than scrap the episode entirely, we elected to publish it and note that the primary source is now obscured.
The Issues
For nearly three decades, workforce engagement research has tracked the drivers of employee engagement without fair pay or basic respect ranking among them. They were assumed… baseline conditions of employment, not variables. Workforce Science Associates now reports both have emerged as engagement predictors for the first time, and the question is what that says about the state of work.
The discussion connects the finding to the cost of living crisis, where wages are failing to keep pace even for top-quartile earners; to survey methodology and sample bias, since engagement surveys skew toward white-collar professionals; and to a generational shift in expectations, where work is allowed to be just work.
It ends on the collapse of workplace loyalty: a company that demanded everything shut down, and the talented people who gave it their careers are now entering a job market described as total garbage.
Topical Q&A
What drives employee engagement?
Research consistently points to a small set of factors: meaningful work, clarity of expectations, growth opportunities, supportive management, and feeling valued. Increasingly, fair pay and basic respect also rank as predictors. Not because they inspire extra effort, but because their absence reliably destroys commitment. Engagement is built when fundamentals are secure and eroded when they are not.
For most of the past three decades, engagement models treated pay and respectful treatment as hygiene factors, assumed conditions rather than levers to pull. That assumption is breaking down. Global research such as the Work Remastered 2025 study by United Culture found that respect, job security, and fair pay have overtaken ambition and career progression as employee priorities, a shift attributed to economic uncertainty, cost of living pressure, and burnout after years of blurred boundaries between work and life. Perceived pay fairness in particular has an outsized effect: SHRM-reported research finds employees who believe they are paid fairly show higher engagement regardless of their actual pay level, and nearly nine in ten workers who felt underpaid were in fact at or above market rate. The practical takeaway is that engagement surveys now surface what used to be silent assumptions. When fair pay and basic respect appear as statistical drivers rather than background conditions, it signals those fundamentals have eroded enough that employees no longer take them for granted.
Why is perceived pay fairness more important than actual pay?
Employees cannot directly observe market pay, so they judge fairness through process and comparison. PayScale data cited by SHRM shows nearly 90 percent of workers who believed they were underpaid were actually at or above market rate. What determines engagement is whether the process determining pay is understood, transparent, and believed to be fair, not the number on the payslip.
This is the distinction between distributive and procedural fairness. Distributive fairness concerns the outcome; procedural fairness concerns how the decision was made. Because salary information is opaque in most organizations, employees substitute proxies: how raises were communicated, whether criteria were explained, how their compensation compares to peers and to posted ranges in transparent markets. PayScale research found 75 percent of workers who believed they were paid at or above market reported job satisfaction, against 59 percent who believed they were underpaid… and the belief, not the reality, was the dividing line. Two implications follow. First, pay transparency initiatives and salary range disclosure laws shift the battlefield from the amount to the explanation. Second, organizations that under-communicate pay logic create perceived inequity even where none exists. A competitive salary with an unexplained, opaque process can generate less engagement than a modest salary with a clear, defensible one. Fair pay is partly a communication problem.
Should employees stay loyal to one employer or change jobs periodically?
The economic evidence favours periodic mobility. Internal raises typically trail market rates, so job changers usually out-earn stayers over time. Long tenure also narrows exposure to different leadership styles, technologies, and problem domains, which weakens résumé marketability. Loyalty has value only where it is reciprocated with progression, security, and compensation… conditions the employer controls, not the employee.
Workplace loyalty is an asymmetric bargain. Employers benefit from institutional knowledge and retention; employees bear the risk of the employer’s decisions… restructuring, acquisition, shutdown… regardless of their contribution. Engagement research reinforces the point: organizations that demanded total commitment and then dissolved leave long-tenured staff with careers that are hard to translate externally, since years of maintaining stable systems produce fewer articulable achievements than a track record of builds and changes. The generational data is also clear: younger workers treat employment as a contract of bounded scope rather than an identity, and report higher wellbeing as a result. The counterweight is privilege. Periodic mobility requires a functioning labour market and transferable skills; in a weak market, staying is rational risk management. It also requires weighing what tenure does provide: depth, networks, and in some fields, credibility that comes only with time. The balanced position is that tenure should be a choice renewed regularly, not a default held from inertia, and that the decision to stay should be re-examined whenever growth, fair pay, or respect stop being delivered.
Support the Show
Roast the Post is a passion project of Jennifer Houle and Paul Austin-Menear. The show helps job-seekers and employers get dud job ads out of their lives. There are several ways that you can help us on our mission to unf*ck the hiring process…
1 —> Share this episode with someone who’d like it.
2 —> Pick up a copy of our new e-Book, the Job Description Decoder and leave a review. The price is pay-what-you-can (even free), and all proceeds will be donated equally to Ronald McDonald House BC & Yukon, and the Toronto Humane Society.
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