It is widely acknowledged that building an organisation that employees can be proud of is key to employee engagement and attracting and retaining talent – but how can your company stand out, while offering a long-term and meaningful relationship to each employee?

In my last blog I shared how, by curating your employee deal, focussing on quality and reflecting your DNA, you can differentiate your employee deal to attract the best talent. This week I want to focus on the foundation of any winning deal – fairness and transparency.

Fairness is a perception.  If employees don’t feel fairly treated it creates a lot of time consuming ‘noise’.  That noise comes from discussions with managers about the right pay for their key talent, new hires and, potential resignations.  Managers are reacting to pressure from their team and that pressure is redirected to HR. So how can you engage your Managers in an open and transparent process that helps them make more confident decisions about pay and reward and handle those difficult discussions?

A reward structure should be transparent and fair to provide each employee an equal chance of success. Employees and managers should understand how it works, ‘the rules’, and what they need to do to progress their pay and career. Importantly, they need to feel they have the same opportunity as anyone else. 

Demonstrating fairness

Consider using technology to help you. Technology allows you to present big amounts of data in an easy to digest format, it removes the potential for personal bias and adds credibility to your story.  It doesn’t replace the personal relationship between the Manager and employee but it greatly supports it and provides the manager with confidence. Our PayLab platform is a good example, it takes market pay data, plots your employees against it to show where levels, functions and individuals sit against the market.  There are other areas where technology can help for example, performance management and job evaluation.

Gender pay

Gender pay can also encourage long-term, meaningful changes in the business and demonstrate your commitment to fairness. By creating a clear narrative on gender pay differences, with a richer context than the headline figures, published alongside your numbers, you are demonstrating a commitment to improve.

Organisations are increasingly finding that recruiting key talent is the largest barrier to growth.  Ensuring your organisation has a good story to tell on gender pay and fairness of opportunity is critical in ensuring that, despite the significant headline numbers, your organisation is a good place to work for people of both genders. Understanding how your gender pay gap can be managed, and inclusion and pay fairness improved, will be part of the wider drive to establish a culture of fairness and embed your values.

Although the process of generating the calculation for gender pay reporting is reasonably straight forward, it’s the questions that are soon raised that become time consuming.  We are working with clients to provide a long-term plan and narrative, ensuring they are prepared to answer deeper questions, while driving the agenda forward and continuing to add value.

Future Ready HR develops long-play changes which will improve the pay gap in future years - making your organisation more attractive to female employees, demonstrating your commitment to fairness to both genders and improving your talent pool.

Creating an approach to reward that ensures fairness and transparency is key in building an organisation that employees are proud to join and you are proud to lead.

For help with communicating and improving your gender pay gap and introducing fair and transparent reward call us on 020 8038 7121.

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