GENDER PAY REPORTING
Executive summary
“What gets measured gets managed…what gets publicly reported, gets managed even better” summed up the decision made by Friends Life to begin reporting its gender pay gap as a workplace issue in 2012 and which resulted in them being the 2014 winner of the BITC Transparency Award.
The aim of our research was to uncover how the first year of reporting Gender Pay Gap results had delivered, the positives, the negatives and the lessons learned.
The payroll profession spans many disciplines and we sought to hear the views from as many representatives as possible, such as software developers; in-house and outsource providers; and because we had highlighted education and guidance as an area of exploration it was important to consider the source of information from technical writers and professionals working in training and education. Keys areas of interest included software support, previous experience with gender pay gap reporting, communications, guidance and education, the all-important implications of failing to comply – what would the consequences be and of course, what lessons have been learned that would benefit the stakeholder experience going forward. l Software developers were important to the immediate communications piece but as we would expect, payroll professionals proved to be key element within the process, with HR coming a close second together and as was hoped for, from the outset of the policy development for gender pay gap reporting, buy in from senior management was essential.
l Lessons learned would see much earlier preparation in year two, and there is increasing expectation that technology will deliver in year two, what it was unable to deliver in all cases for the first year of reporting.
The EU referendum held in 2016 was identified as the main culprit for the delay in finalising regulations and in providing finalised non statutory guidance. The impact of Brexit hit early with this and many other government
policies that impact payroll as it caused havoc to the parliamentary timetable.
However, much work has been done this year to retrieve the correct data so many are feeling confident that the next gender pay gap reports will be less labour intensive. Nevertheless 47% of survey respondents said they would do something differently in the second year of reporting.
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THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PAYROLL PROFESSIONALS
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