Background
A large public sector utility company contacted Albany HR as they required an independent expert to conduct a thorough equality impact assessment (EQIA) of their changing pay arrangements as part of an organisational wide transformation. The scope of the EQIA was to interrogate every aspect of the proposed pay arrangement framework and the change implementation (which included role directories, job evaluation, salary banding and salary management processes) and consider whether these changes adversely impacted any protected characteristics groups or indeed had any adverse impact considering the organisation’s wider diversity aspirations.
Client Needs
The client needed an objective report on the impact of transitioning to these new arrangements. An EQIA is a critical requirement of public sector equality duty, and the output of this report was of interest to various stakeholders including the transformation team – leaders, HR specialists, employee representatives and trade union officials.
Solution
Our experienced HR consultant met with the HR sponsors of the transformation team to discuss the scope and review all the materials relevant to the new pay framework and its implementation. This included reviewing anonymised data of the current and future pay picture with particular focus on protected characteristic groups. In addition, our consultant met with the employee representative groups to understand their perspective and expectations of the report. The consultant also discussed any concerns the employee representatives had on what was proposed.
To shape the report there was a full interrogation of source materials including equality commitments, current and future state mapping to the pay structure, any work that had taken place to review equality considerations and implementation actions. In addition, external data and best practices were considered and referenced to support the overall review and recommendations.
Outcome
A thorough report was created to evaluate the equality impact of the proposed new pay framework and the various associated actions which would be taken to implement this. This was presented to the HR project and leadership team and the employee representatives and met all stakeholder expectations.
You can read more about another case study where we supported a client with a full pay review.
If you need support with Equality impact assessments, pay frameworks or reward benchmarking, let’s talk.
