How do you strike a balance between the need for pay transparency and internal equity across regions, specifically if you have international teams with different cost-of-living standards?

Regarding internal equity, we have country-based base salary pay ranges as markets differ in terms of labor supply and demand, inflation, and macroeconomic factors. We recommend incentive earning opportunities % to be based on the job grade, regardless of the country.

We have not started yet our journey on pay transparency, and we have done some preliminary assessments. We would envision a global framework, impacting both the countries with a specific legislation and those without it.
Happy to chat about this topic with those in this network who have an interest.

It's tricky isn't it, wanting to do the right thing knowing it might cause issues elsewhere.  

For us treating employees like adults is a core part of our approach.  We're very open in each local environment, and make it clear that overall we're aiming for a good average level of benefit for each employee recognising that all employees have different needs.  We don't publish any information outside the relevant country, but we don't worry if information is shared across sites/countries - because then it's just about having an adult conversation.  

Occasionally we find we have an agitatious (if that's a word!) conversation with an employee who didn't think it was fair that .. got ... and they didn't.  We just sit down with that person, point out the realities of differences, and they've always broadly got it - and sometimes it raises a good question about whether something should change, eg paternity leave in the US.  It hadn't really occured to us to really change it much until someone pointed out how much better it was in the UK, and did it really matter which country the father was in ....

Like any other country or regional differences such as taxation, healthcare offering, social security, pay transparency needs to be positioned in the right context. Looking at pay transparency on a global level would be the same at looking at pension plans globally or taxation alignment. We cannot compare different countries,  we can only compare within a country and to make sure that we are paying people as it should be done and be transparent way, if you have a job grading system and salary benchmarks, it does not mean that everybody needs to have the exact same salary but Rewards leaders needs to be sure that people do sit in the benchmark. If this data is correct, then transparency will be easier. So pay transparency can be done globally but you need to put it in the right context of how every country is organized and governed.