Managing Pay Review – Five key areas for HR to address : Innecto Reward Consulting

Posted by Spencer Hughes on 24 February 2023

Managing Pay Review – Five key areas for HR to address

When it comes to Pay Review, HR can often find themselves losing valuable time in complex manual processes and ultimately without the tools they need to make informed decisions. Here are five common areas of concern where Innecto's Advance tool can almost certainly help.

1. Data gathering

One of the most time-consuming elements of Pay Review, and which tends to kick things off by necessity, is gathering the data needed to inform the entire process. That could include employee information such as current salary, location, start date, internal range, performance rating, job family, market comparison. It typically takes a lot of man-hours to compile, sense check and review with changes throughout the process taking a lot of resources to reverse engineer.

How Advance helps: As part of the onboarding process with Advance, we show clients what the platform does, the data it needs and when it needs it. Some of the data is needed up front and some later, so while Advance doesn’t specifically help with data harvesting, it certainly provides a checklist and organisational tool to collate the data in one place. From there, decisions can be far more informed.

2. Building a birds-eye view

Even when saying, “We're giving everyone a flat 3% increase”. That kind of Pay Review decision is relatively simple but can still take multiple hours to manage and to implement but often doesn’t address the more nuanced areas. Increasingly the inclusion of pay ranges, performance bands, internal equity and how people compare against the market is being taken into consideration for the pay review process. Depending on how an organisation operates, having flexible oversight of all this information is essential to have the ability to make informed, fair decisions.

3. Working within budget constraints

Linked to the previous point, every HR manager will be familiar with the trade-off between rewarding high performance and the constraints of a 5% salary bill pot. Simply put, you can’t please everyone all the time.

How Advance helps: In both areas above Advance offers a range of benefits by harnessing the data and enabling HR and decision-makers to dynamically remodel Pay Review scenarios by showing how certain changes could impact the budget at the click of a button, whether applied to one employee, the top 10% performers or an entire department. Provisionally allocating budget by department also allows you to understand the wider impacts on internal equity, keep tabs on external equity by integrating market data comparisons and assess staff performance within the organisation and against the market.

4. Fairness and Equity

Ensuring fairness and equity in the Pay Review process is an increasingly hot topic, as it should be, and balancing what the organisation can do and what employees want can be challenging. Striking the right balance is essential to the employer-employee relationship.

How Advance helps: By applying their gender and ethnicity data and policies to the system via their user settings, a client can review the ‘before’ and ‘after’ impact of a particular scenario or decision on certain populations of their workforce and address it where necessary.

5. Administering the process

After the gathering of the data, the second most time-consuming element of Pay Review is the overall administration: manager review, chasing managers, amending employee records, resending to managers. If you have a manual, paper-based process things can fall down very quickly.

How Advance helps: With separate logins for each manager, they can log into the system to access their specific employee population. They can review, add comments, and send back to HR. If there are any errors HR can either amend for reappraisal by the manager or simply amend and finalise. Either way, the changes are synced, and the data has one source of truth. Not only is this level of automated reporting great for managers, but it also gives HR oversight of all managers’ progress. They can see, for example, that Manager A is 80% complete while Manager B has not yet started and needs to be chased.