Calling time on racially driven pay inequalities.
The McGregor-Smith review has outlined recommendations for all businesses to consider.
A leading requirement from the report is for employers publish the information they have available.
Employers must publish their aspirational targets, be transparent about their progress and be accountable for delivering them. The Government must also legislate to make larger businesses publish their ethnicity data by salary band to show progress. This isn’t about naming and shaming. No large business has a truly diverse and inclusive workforce from top to bottom at the moment, but through publishing this data, the best employers will be able to show their successes and encourage others to follow.
PayGap.io allows you to centrally store, analyse and report all of your employee ethnicity data in a single location. Produce graphs and output reports outlining the relationships between pay and ethnic diverstity.
Until we know where we stand and how we are performing today, it is impossible to define and deliver real progress. No company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion can be taken seriously until it collects, scrutinises and is transparent with its workforce data. This means being honest with themselves about where they are and where they need to get to as well as being honest with the people they employ.
Use our employee questionaire to enable your workforce to report their own background information. The results of the questionaire are then fed into PayGap.io and used for reporting and analysis.
Setting aspirational targets only works if you have robust data to both establish the baseline and measure the impact of positive action. When I wrote to the CEOs of FTSE 100 companies in February 2016, I asked them to provide an anonymised version of their employee ethnicity data to the review team. The request asked for mean and median pay data, the number of employees within £20,000 salary bands and the number of employees in each category of seniority by ethnic group. I believed that understanding how some of the UK’s most prominent firms collect, store and use ethnicity data would provide an insight into best practice and areas for improvement amongst the wider business community. The responses were certainly interesting. Only 74 FTSE 100 companies responded and just over half of those were able to provide data. For the companies that responded, there were wide variations in the type of data that companies collected and the number of people who had completed the ethnicity category.
There's clearly a huge spectrum in regards to the data that companies are collecting and in many cases simply not collecting it at all. We want to enable all businesses to have a standard platform that allows them monitor their existing workforce and the diversity throughout it.
By using PayGap.io to standardise the data that companies collect we can provide a platform for change. So few companies are collecting meaningful data and this is something that must be addressed. Using PayGap.io will move you in the right diretion by allowing you to store and assess against internally set benchmarks so you can truly understand the diverse nature of your company.
No employer can honestly say they are improving the ethnic diversity of their workforce unless they know their starting point and can monitor their success over time. Simply stating a commitment to diversity or establishing a race network is not sufficient to drive lasting change. We have seen with the gender pay reporting requirements that where employers are required to collect and publish key data, they will take action. For that reason, I believe it is essential that as well as collecting this data, all large employers must publish their workforce ethnicity data annually. This is already a legal requirement in the US and so is perfectly possible.
We want PayGap.io to be your starting point, a starting point on what will be the lasting change within your company. Implenting PayGap.io in your business is taking action.