Human Resources: You recently heavily criticized board salaries on social networks. What was the reason for your post?
Sven Franke: It wasn’t a single trigger, but a series of events. On the one hand, there was the board compensation study by the German Association for the Protection of Securities Ownership (DSW), according to which the salaries of the CEOs of the largest listed companies in Germany increased by around 13 percent in 2025. At the same time, the media reported on wage negotiations that were about compensating for inflation. At the same time, the EU Pay Transparency Directive forces companies to disclose their remuneration logic. If you put the three strands side by side, it becomes clear that one point is being missed in the individual debates, namely: We demand real traceability from HR in the engine room, while completely different rules apply in the executive office.
What exactly do you mean by the different rules of the game?
Currently, there are usually two different systems regulating remuneration in the same organization. So we have two compensation worlds with different criteria, mechanisms and levels of transparency. One applies to the “engine room”, i.e. the workers and employees, and one applies to the board members. The question for HR managers is therefore: How do you want to explain to your employees that they are grouped according to comprehensible criteria and that completely different rules apply three or four floors higher?
