Companies preparing for the EU Pay Transparency Directive are asking a new question: Not just “What tool will we use?” but “How will we best support our people through Right to Information?”
How you answer shapes everything else.
Most teams want a single workflow they can roll out everywhere. That won’t work. No one process fits every employee population.
The companies doing this well aren’t focused on choosing a single workflow and rolling it out globally. They’re evaluating what each employee population needs and designing for support. That’s a different mindset to Article 7, and 27 different transpositions of the Directive are about to demand it.
How transposition complicates EU Pay Transparency Right to Information
There’s a single deadline but no single law. As of today, Slovakia is the only country with a final transposition in place to meet the 7 June deadline. Belgium and Malta have partial laws covering pieces of the Directive. Poland passed a partial law in December 2025 and is delaying the rest; its Right to Information draft shortens the response window to 30 days (half the Directive’s requirement, which is two months.) Romania’s draft sets a response time of 30 working days. Czechia, Denmark, and the Netherlands are targeting 1 January 2027. Cyprus, Finland, Italy, Latvia, and Lithuania have published only drafts. Sweden paused its draft in March and is pushing the Commission for renegotiation. Ireland will miss the deadline and phase in its rules. France is still drafting. Germany has no draft. Spain only just finished its pre-drafting public consultation.
Every draft lands differently: local language requirements; different roles for works councils; different response windows; privacy thresholds that vary on minimum group size before averages can be released; different documentation expectations from labor inspectors.
For example, if you operate across five EU countries, you’re not solving one Right to Info challenge. You’re supporting employees across five regulatory environments on five different timelines.
That makes “support” a moving target. Build a process today that fits Slovakia’s June 2026 rules, and you likely won’t fit Spain’s when the Royal Decree finally lands.
Different populations need different support on Right to Info
We recently helped a global retailer design their Right to Information workflow. They have 24,000 EU employees. Roughly 75% are hourly retail and warehouse workers; the rest are corporate with a heavier concentration of operations and sales support in two countries. A single workflow was never going to fit the three distinct employee populations.
The hourly workforce is most likely to make the request through a works council or worker representative. The disclosure needs to be fast, in local language, and reviewable across many employees at once. A document in the relevant EU language is the best fit, particularly when a representative needs to look at a whole group together.
The corporate population is a different conversation. Those employees already check Workday for everything compensation related. The disclosure should live where they already look for pay information: inside their HRIS profile. Not in a separate document or email chain.
The technical org routes every employee request through ServiceNow. Adding a “Right to Information” request type to the existing case management is a much smaller change than introducing a new tool. In this scenario, the request is reviewed and approved in the system the team already trusts, and the response comes back through the same channel. That is how you support a population that already has an established way of asking for things.
That is one company with three employee populations, all of which have different needs. While the delivery method is different, the underlying data must be consistent. Whatever channel reaches each population, the underlying analysis must be identical, or the numbers won’t be defensible. Same comparison group. Same compensation definition. Same hourly logic.
The risk of picking one workflow
When you commit to a single EU Pay Transparency Directive Right to Information delivery method before transposition is settled, you’re making multiple bets: that every country you operate in will accept the format you chose; that every employee population will be comfortable getting disclosures through that channel; that the workflow you build in early 2026 is still the one you want in 2027 when the first formal pay reports are due, and again in 2028 when the next wave of transpositions lands.
If any of those bets miss, you’re forcing employees into an ill-fitting process, and setting yourself up to do the engineering work at least twice when you have to go back to fix it.
We’ve seen companies start with documents because that was fastest to stand up, only to learn their works councils wanted a structured spreadsheet to review across an entire job category. We’ve seen companies build directly into Workday, then discover their engineering org wanted Right to Information requests routed through ServiceNow, where every other employee request already lives. The fix in both cases requires real engineering work nobody planned for.
Single solution, multiple Right to Information workflows
The Syndio platform hedges every bet, giving enterprises the flexibility needed to deliver requests in multiple ways, to different employee populations.
You configure it once per workspace: category-of-work grouping, comparison logic, compensation definition, hourly treatment. From there, you can:
- Generate editable disclosures in 24 languages
- Export a bulk spreadsheet of an entire workspace
- Push results directly into an employee’s HRIS profile
- Call the API from ServiceNow, Slack, Teams, or whatever workflow tool already runs your employee requests.
Every disclosure for every employee in that workspace runs against the same rules. That’s what makes the numbers defensible to a labor inspector, a works council, a court, and your board.
Because analysis is consistent, delivery doesn’t have to be. You choose the channel for every population in each country, under all governance structures.
The hard part isn’t generating a number. It’s getting the right disclosure to the right people, in the right format, through the channel they already use, in a way that meets the local rules.
While the EU Pay Transparency Directive is where some companies may start, the Syndio platform is built for what comes next. Once your Right to Information process is in place, the same technology foundation that makes your disclosures defensible also powers pay gap analysis and reporting, pay governance, and real-time decision support, so every pay decision your organisation makes is compliant, optimized, and aligned to business strategy.
What success looks like
The companies with the most effective Right to Information strategies didn’t choose a perfect, single workflow in early 2026. They started with the needs of their different employee populations, built their setup around it, and stayed flexible enough to adjust. So when Spain’s transposition lands differently than Germany’s, and as their works council comes back asking for something they didn’t anticipate, they’ll have the right answers.
If you’re reading this now and the conversation at your organisation is “Which workflow do we pick?” reframe it: What does every population need and how do we reach them in a way that fits how they already work? The answers to these questions are more useful, and will reduce work for you in June 2026 and for every requirement that follows. Contact our team to learn more.
