Meeting the Gender Pay Gap deadline

Action plans

Another new addition to the GEO’s guidance on Gender Pay Gap reporting is to include an action plan. This is not mandatory, but is advised. The supporting narrative can run throughout the report to explain your view on why gender pay gaps exist in your organisation and what you’ve done so far to change that.

Publishing your action plan is a very public commitment to improving your gender pay gap. This is important, but remember if you are going to talk-the-talk in your pay gap report, make sure you walk-the-walk by making real improvements for your employees.

Your future

Once you publish your 2020 Gender Pay Gap results you might be relieved that it is ticked off your list until March when you start to think about the next deadline. Don’t stop here! As shown in the image below, the optimum time to analyse your Gender Pay Gap is May - July.

Why waiting until close to the deadline to look at your data, you have nine months of inaction when you could have been using the insights from your data to make better people decisions, build trust, increase transparency and engage talent.

Don’t stop at gender. Ask yourself: what is our strategy for analysing other protected characteristics?

In July the Government announced that:

1. They will debate mandatory Ethnicity Pay Gap reporting in September.
2. A billion pound package of support for disability inclusion includes funding for a consultation into mandatory disability workforce reporting.

If made mandatory, both will require a roadmap to collect, analyse, report and communicate your data. This requires more thought and resource than Gender Pay Gap analysis and reporting does.

You should consider whether you have the expertise and resources to do this internally, or whether it makes more sense to seek specialist support to take the guesswork headache out of this process.