Corporate Governance Needs to Go Beyond Gender Pay

Every company has the necessary data for company-wide workforce pay and policy reporting, proves uFlexReward 

LONDON, Feb. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As the 2020 reporting season gets underway, remuneration continues to be an area of focus. While some companies voluntarily disclosed the difference in pay between the CEO and the wider workforce in their 2018 annual report, all listed companies with more than 250 UK employees will need to make that disclosure this reporting season under the 2018 UK Corporate Governance Code.  

The new code also includes one provision that is causing a lot of last-minute activity. Compliance and legal advisors are advising Remuneration Committees (Remco) they must "review workforce remuneration and related policies and the alignment of incentives and rewards with culture," Section 5, Prov 33. 

To satisfy this, companies need to show that remuneration across the business is living up to policy statements on equal pay and opportunity. This travels far beyond the easier task of reporting on CEO pay ratios and the Gender Pay Gap.

Remco's are now demanding data on a much wider range of factors that relate to pay equality and diversity. Additionally, they want to see all reward data including shares, benefits and pension and not just pay.

Given the widely scattered data sources, organisations will struggle to collect the data to report accordingly, but Leena Nair, Unilever's Chief Human Resource Officer, said, "There's no excuse for any company to say, 'I can't do this, because I don't have the data to provide Remco's with the insights they need.' Every company has the data. They must provide it."

Responsible for producing the data for Unilever's report is uFlexReward, the world's leading digital total reward platform has today released uFR Lite aimed to specifically help organisations go beyond compliance and look at all of the reward frameworks and mechanisms in place across the entire workforce.

Nair, who is responsible for providing pay equity data to Unilever's Remco said, "It could take months to manually extract from the many systems that handle workforce pay, bonuses, pensions and benefits, but uFlexReward were able to provide Unilever with a complete Pay Equity data warehouse, with a suite of reports and unlimited analytics within 48 hours. 

Unilever has now asked uFlexReward to make this important data gathering functionality, that supports pay equality and diversity, available to peer organisations," added Nair.

"Many companies are facing a pay equity "data gap" because their pay equity audits focused on gender pay equality and not other areas of inequality. Nearly all companies have equal pay and equal opportunity policies that extend beyond gender – so the Remcos will want to see what they are doing," said Ken Charman, CEO of uFlexReward. 

uFR's full Pay Equity Report shows data for all employees, all categories of reward (not just compensation) across the complete spectrum of employee demographics. Together with the factors used to explain pay variation; grades, bands within grades, job definitions and others. 

"More importantly, given the reporting deadlines, this is a services project, so it is instantly available without the long and arduous process of IT procurement," added Charman. "We can produce a report that covers many layers of an organisation's workforce pay and policies that the Remcos can navigate through to get further insights if needed, by applying reward policies to an anonymised employee demographics file extracted from their human resources information system."

The reports can even go broader than that, and into reputational implications as well, which will be of interest to board members who are paying increased attention to risk management after ongoing and very public corporate scandals, and the resulting negative impact on company performance. 

"Businesses in sectors with known wide gender pay gaps should already be auditing their salary structures on a role-by-role basis and taking necessary measures to address anomalies, uFR makes this possible, without creating a new industry of reporting," concluded Charman.

About uFlexReward

uFlexReward offers a digital dashboard for real-time access for full-time employees and contingent workers to their Total Rewards Statement, enabling full visibility of salary, bonus, pension, benefits, stock options, health plans and more. It's a platform that was successfully developed and implemented by Unilever for their own employees worldwide, and now available to all organisations looking to implement a reward strategy for a digital age. 

For more information, please visit https://www.uflexreward.com/