Paydata: Personnel Today Awards 2019 HR Consultancy Finalist

We are delighted to have been shortlisted as HR Consultancy of the Year at the Personnel Today Awards 2019.

Here we outline our mission and the recent client projects that demonstrate the scale of the reward projects that we undertake on our clients’ behalf.

Our mission

Our work as a specialist Reward Management Consultancy focuses on making people’s lives better at work. We enable clients to attract, retain and motivate people to deliver their business’ vision by ensuring that employees feel valued in their role.

Addressing HR challenges

The challenge typically faced by clients is how to pay their people fairly, appropriately and in ways that activate their business strategy. Often the starting point is little structure and no rationale for determining who gets paid what. Numerous issues follow, including high turnover, difficulty recruiting, low morale and inequality.

A recent example of how organic expansion impacted our client’s business was our work with network operator ESP Utilities Group. They work with housing developers, social landlords, industry and individuals to maintain the gas and electricity networks throughout the United Kingdom. After 20 years in operation, they wanted to introduce a grading structure for all roles across the organisation.

ESP employs around 75 people in 45 unique roles and had no formal methodology for evaluating their roles. They faced three key challenges:

1. Create a consistent and equitable framework to manage personal development and careers.
2. Illustrate how jobs relate to one another to achieve parity of pay.
3. Provide an equitable, fair, transparent and consistent approach to how grades are defined and jobs are graded.

The innovative PAYgrade methodology and software package intuitively evaluates all roles, from those requiring on-the-job training to the CEO. We used job-grading skills built up over decades of practical experience to focus on the key things that characterise jobs of different specialisms and skills. The approach was pivotal for ESP Utilities to adopt a defined system throughout the organisation. Clear career paths were introduced, which covered gas and electrical engineers alongside finance, HR and marketing personnel.

Project outcomes:

• Increased employee engagement by defining job responsibility and progression paths;
• Reduced employee turnover by offering meaningful reward; and
• Streamlined HR processes to allocate pay and benefits resources consistently and fairly.

Communication was key to the project’s successful implementation. We engaged with a range of stakeholders and maximised buy-in at all levels of the business.

Solutions suited to your culture

We co-create HR strategies to address our clients’ unique challenges, from FTSE 100 multinationals to small charities. Customers cite our team’s prior experience on ‘the other side of the desk’ as an enormous reassurance that brings a fresh perspective to their approach.

It is critical that we understand the organisation’s business strategy, HR strategy, strengths, challenges, people, organisational structure and what it wants to achieve. During our work for Sunrise Senior Living, we addressed an issue faced by the sector as a whole; an average employee turnover of 30 per cent. Our trusted partnership with Sunrise Living came from a deep understanding of their business through close collaboration.

Sunrise Senior Living manages over 20 homes across the UK and offers personalised care and lifestyle services to residents. Operating in a highly competitive industry has led us to develop innovative solutions to their recruitment and retention issues. Sunrise offers a strong training programme. Individuals can be trained within three months. We collaborate on projects to future-proof their talent pool, creating well-established career development paths to inspire, engage and motivate staff, and advise on the impact of Brexit. We have also provided the HR team with measurable ways to demonstrate the commercial value of HR to the operation of the business at the C-Suite level.

Ambitious projects

Paydata creates and delivers innovative reward management solutions that focus on adding value; reducing turnover and recruitment problems; and increasing engagement through simplification of pay arrangements.

Our ongoing work for The Orders of St John’s Care Trust follows on from an ambitious project that successfully introduced a consistent framework throughout the care home system. We worked with OSJCT to successfully adopt a ‘One Trust’ approach across their 69 homes and 9 extra care housing schemes across Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire within 3 months.

The new HR approach significantly impacted the organisational operation of our client. Managers are able to focus on the quality of their review decisions rather than administering an inconsistent process. The framework supports greater employee engagement and leadership. We remain a trusted partner for advising on developing areas of HR, such as advice on the CEO Pay Regulations.

Long-standing, trusted relationships

Customers tell us that they value the combination of our reward experts taking the time to understand, responding quickly and giving clients the confidence to solve complex HR issues. If you would like to speak to us about any aspect of reward, get in touch.

Look out for us at the Personnel Today Awards on 19 November 2019 where we are shortlisted alongside Egremont Group, Engage, McCrudden Training, PS Human Resources and Synergy Creative.