Nowadays, HR world’s priorities are filled with Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and priorities.
I’m not surprised by this as we have seen how the world is shaken recently on this matter. My aim in this post is to share my thoughts about D&I initiative and how they can be linked to Rewards practices.
What’s D&I anyways?
Global Diversity Practice, a global consultancy firm specializing on such practices, defines it as follows:
Diversity is any dimension that can be used to differentiate groups and people from one another. In a nutshell, it’s about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different, in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, education, and national origin.
Inclusion is an organizational effort and practices in which different groups or individuals having different backgrounds are culturally and socially accepted and welcomed, and equally treated. These differences could be self-evident, such as national origin, age, race and ethnicity, religion/belief, gender, marital status and socioeconomic status or they could be more inherent, such as educational background, training, sector experience, organizational tenure, even personality, such as introverts and extroverts.
Simply put, it’s a dimension which can explain the differences of your workforce by several groupings and respecting those differences.
How does it relate to Rewards?
In the recent years, we started seeing an accelerated effort from a lot of states to point these and how they relate to the social welfare of their population. Obviously, it’s directly correlated to the workforce and the workforce’s living.
For any member of the society, who is also a part of an organization and earns a certain level of compensation and is entitled to some benefits, it automatically impacts their involvement in the broader society.
A perfect example for such exercise is gender pay gap.
A lot of countries are concentrating on passing legislation that checks the pay equity between gender, ethnic group or race. It’s generally a reflection of the social issues that the respective country faces and tries to either increase awareness or even penalize based on the results.
Past reflections
I wrote about different pay scales for different nationalities and how this practice was interestingly common in the Middle East long time ago.
I believe this is diminished significantly over the years but it was a great example how far we came along and how much further we need to go.
You can even see the French legislation and see that one of the major indications is about getting a salary increase after returning from maternity leave. This is deliberately added to the legislation as the pay discrimination against French working moms is systemically common and creates a pay gap that is becoming harder to close as year passes by.
What can we do?
These were few examples in our field that shows how pay equity is created, and unfortunately, pretty easily.
My quick step-by-step recommendation on effective pay equity and fairness work are as follows:
1. Conduct regular checks
Obviously, everything starts by analyzing and identifying the gaps. If you don’t ask question, you will never get an answer. Therefore, asking the right questions, looking at all the different data cuts is vital.
2. Find the root cause
Once you identified the gaps, dig deep and understand the root cause. Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to tell that a pay gap is because of a wrong offer that’s extended or it’s just an outlier. Bear in mind that a compensation "life cycle" is technically a timeline and the reason could lie at any point of that timeline. Reflecting back is pretty helpful in this case.
3. Train your workforce / Create awareness
Create awareness and educate your workforce on importance of pay parity and fairness. Start from the population that has a decision-making authority in Rewards processes, but scale it to the whole workforce. Cascading this responsibility with creating awareness will help you down the line.
4. Keep the consistency on practices
Be consistent. I think this is already a crucial aspect of being a Rewards person but exceptions create outliers; outliers create inequity.
Please let me know if you’d like to see more hands-on examples on how to look into these processes or if you are looking for more details on these aspects.