Research: Fairness, flexibility and affordability

As well as analysing the trends in UK pay and rewards over the past 30 years, this Institute for Employment Studies (IES) paper offers guidance on three areas that reward professionals should consider moving forward: low pay, gender pay and total rewards.

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.