Educating and negotiating with unions around pay and benchmarking : Innecto Reward Consulting

Posted by Justine Woolf on 06 April 2023

Educating and negotiating with unions around pay and benchmarking

When working with trade unions it is almost always useful to take a step back at the outset and ask one key question: when it comes to reward, how can we make sure that everyone is speaking the same language and understanding things from both sides?

Trade union officials often have a wealth of knowledge and experience, in fact they may have been involved in a sector or industry for decades. They understand their roles, empathise with the challenges employees face on a daily basis and want to ensure that employers treat employees in a fair manner in all aspects of working life. On the other hand, they have often received no formal training in reward, and can sometimes find our ‘HR language’ difficult to decipher. With local representatives, our general experience is that their views are typically formed by what they know and what they have seen on the ground.

The need for education

Before getting to the point of negotiation or consultation, it helps to ensure everyone is on the same page and speaking the same language. To achieve this, it can be a useful exercise to run education sessions explaining the different elements of reward and how we manage them in practice. This is particularly important when we are looking to implement new pay structures because TU representatives may not necessarily understand how they have been constructed, the data that has been chosen to support market positioning, or how that information is being applied in practice.

Pay benchmarking can often be a sticking point with unions because it requires explanation in terms of context and application. Anyone reading a pay benchmarking report with no understanding of salary surveys, how data is weighted or how roles are matched may struggle to understand its relevance to the matter in hand and the roles they represent.

Benchmarking context

For example, in the education sector, while some roles require a direct background in education, many others do not need to be sourced from schools or universities. In terms of benchmarking, for most roles, looking beyond the educational context into general industry (where talent may be heading to or recruited from) is likely to be more appropriate as a comparison.

Without explaining this, union representatives may struggle to understand why a general industry survey has been used, or why blended matches are referenced to help provide a data lens for more specialist or unique roles. Only by bringing in that broader perspective and separating data sources can we help inform decisions, and bring our TU colleagues along with us.

This again comes back to speaking the same language, and ensuring we understand each other. To achieve this, we need to spend time explaining the reward strategy, illustrating how a market stance has been determined, and highlighting what we have done to ensure alignment with that market. Operating in this ‘open book’ way we can share data sources, outline the companies participating in them, why they’ve been chosen and how we monitor data contained within them.

We have also worked with clients to produce fact sheets for staff and TUs explaining the client’s approach, method and outcomes to create total transparency. All of these things build trust which is the fundamental basis for any relationship, particularly because reward can be a very emotive subject.

Preparing to negotiate

Meaningful and successful negotiations are always founded on a solid groundwork of careful preparation and strong relationship-building that enables good communication.

The guiding principle should be to achieve effective and continual communications with the right people within the unions. To achieve this, you need relationships that are built on mutual trust and the ability to listen to each other. This becomes particularly important when adversarial positions arise from the difficult decisions that inevitably need to be made. If the communication and dialogue start early, you always stand a better chance of taking people with you on that journey, rather than against you.