4 tips on achieving equal pay at your company

European Equal Pay Day falls in mid-November, symbolically marking when women stop earning in the year. Across the EU, men earn 12.7% more, equalling 1.5 months of salary. Does your company match the average? According to the EU’s Pay Transparency Directive, this knowledge is now a must for many organisations. Pay inequality causes both employee experience and business growth to suffer, so how do you narrow the gap? We asked SD Worx Chief People Officer, Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens, to share his advice.

According to Bruce, “Staying compliant is only one reason to work on equal pay. If you want to make the best possible decisions in any area of business, you need to make sure you have a diverse group of people in the room. That’s the only way to make smart choices, whether you’re choosing a supplier, drafting an agreement, or developing a marketing campaign: you need to gather and leverage all the perspectives that you yourself might be missing out on. And to be a business that attracts diverse people, you need to treat them all in a completely equal way. Pay is just one component of that, but it’s a critical one. If equal pay isn’t a priority on your to-do list, you’ll never achieve your business goals.”

When we asked Bruce how to get started, he said, “First, you need to get a clear overview of exactly how much everyone is earning, organised in a dataset you can learn something from. If you don’t have the data, then you’re just having philosophical conversations and it’s impossible to take any action. The right payroll provider should be able to generate the data you need and support you in using data analytics to understand the size of your gender pay gap and how it compares to the average in countries where you operate. Payroll analytics can also give you a clear view of which employees are earning unusually more or less than others, and where a person’s salary sits in comparison to the average for their role, so you can make pay more equal in more ways than one.”

A straightforward pay gap analysis is a great place to start, but according to Bruce that’s just the beginning: “Achieving true pay equity means equal pay for all minorities, it’s not only a gendered issue. Many companies also need to consider benefits-in-kind that employees choose with salary sacrifice. When every employee is unique, achieving equal pay is an ongoing process of evolution, and it can be a big challenge. But a growing number of HR service providers now offer pay equity analysis, using sophisticated analytical models to help you identify and then solve any inequalities.”

Bruce is passionate about the power of transparency, saying “I know salary transparency can be a sensitive topic, and if you were to make all salaries public at your organisation right now, it might be a shock. But total pay transparency is something you should work towards if you don’t want to be left behind: it’s the future of the world of work. And it starts with leadership. Those of us leading the way should model a culture of pay transparency for others, making sure our people know that it’s okay to talk about how much they make. It probably won’t feel comfortable at first, but it’s all part of the continuous evolution that HR leaders need to embrace if we want to continue attracting the best talent and supporting business growth.”