Recap on: Pay Trends 2025
And so the dust settles on another Pay Trends event, the 11th we have held since we first came up with the idea and it was great to see so many familiar and new faces in London. Looking back, each one of these events has carried its own significance for HR and Reward, but especially since the pandemic.
It can be no coincidence that the turnout for this 2025 event was our biggest yet, so thank you all who attended for your engagement and input, without which it wouldn’t as enriching for all involved.
If you did miss it, please download our Pay Trends White Paper which outlines all the main topics and trends we covered, which I’ll also use this article to briefly summarise.
Economic background: rising costs
We started by outlining how the business pay pot for 2025 is being squeezed by a combination of rises in NI and the living wage, cost of living increases and market wage growth. Sheila Attwood from Brightmine gave us insights into the pay increases projected for 2025 – you can find more information about this in our latest Winter Insights paper which will be available from the Resource Hub.
Against this backdrop, we explored our priority areas of reward, and how HR can mitigate these challenges while still supporting employee attraction and retention.
Benefits 2.0
My colleague Simon Cook outlined how many companies are now opting to revisit the relevance and vitality of their benefits offering. He spoke about the concept of Flexibility and how it now goes beyond the WfH debate to span location, working days and the shape of the working week, work-life balance and options around leave.
Mirroring society’s growing awareness around mental health, we looked at how Financial & Health Benefits now include Mental health support, preventative measures in health and wellbeing and financial support structures available via EAPs.
Simon also addressed pending or potential legislative change that could impact pay and reward in the next 12-24 months, and outlined our three key areas for all companies to strongly consider, irrespective of the benefits they offer: 1. Communication 2. Supplier review and 3. Technology.
Transparency
We delved into the impacts and implications of this increasingly hot topic. Using a combination of survey data and client perspective, Cathryn Edmondson talked through important trends and considerations including the collection of employee data, job levelling, the importance of review pay structures, equality monitoring, the increase in focus on Gender Pay analysis and broader implications on benefits.
She also underlined the importance of effective two-way communication, outlined the key challenges standing in the way of this and how to mitigate them, including nurturing executive support and showing leaders how and why transparency can pay dividends.
Skills and training – a renewed emphasis for 2025
Cathryn also used a broad spectrum of data to question the ongoing value of the degree (and other higher education qualifications) in the modern workplace, and whether in-work learning and upskilling is becoming more relevant, particularly among young people who lean towards tech.
We discussed the rise in EdTech companies offering alternatives to formal education, and the importance of agility given the pace of technological change, and the proportion of future jobs we may not even yet understand or know how to teach.
All of this was considered through a lens of career mobility, pay parity, career progression and the importance of investment in management training. We were also delighted that Josephina Smith joined Sarah Lardner for a fireside chat, exploring the evolving landscape of Reward and discussed strategies for fostering equitable and rewarding workplaces.
Pay Progression
Finally, with the cost of replacing an employee estimated between £14,000 and £50,000, I spoke about the importance of retaining the workers we invest in, and how we can do better to maximise the return on investment they bring back to our businesses by extending their Lifetime Value.
In this section we covered the importance of Pay Progression mechanics and surfaced the common challenges being faced in Pay Progression, including lack of budget, lack of a framework to enable decision-making and the inability of companies to model the impact of potential change. We also discussed the key – and sometimes uncomfortable - questions companies should be asking themselves to enable Pay Progression in a sustainable way.
We already look forward to hosting another Pay Trends in 2026!
To discuss any of the issues covered in Pay Trends 2025, please contact Justine.Woolf@innecto.com
