Research: Fairness, flexibility and affordability
Key findings:
- Skills-based pay progression will become increasingly evident once again across all sectors in the years ahead.
- Unregulated and flexible performance and market-based pay and bonus systems appear to have reinforced pay gaps and produced unexplained gender differences.
- The new reporting requirements are forcing many private sector employers to review the consistency and fairness of their pay determination methods.
- Improving levels of engagement and productivity is about the interaction of financial and non-financial factors and tailoring the approach to suit each organisation and its workforce, not a single pay practice.
This paper, authored by IES' head of HR consultancy Duncan Brown, suggests that many employers have become fixated by low-cost reward models of low pay awards, little pay progression, worse benefits and limited, uncertain working hours.