Unilever has launched uFlexReward to help other employers with their gender pay gap reporting and address anomalies, as well as helping those that want to understand and report other pay gaps, which may become statutory in the future.

Pay gap reporting

uFlexRewardoffers a complete service to any organisation to automatically calculate pay equity data. In a unique approach, it can calculate accurate reward data for every employee, compliant with reporting guidelines, without the client having to install any software. This approach eliminates the lengthy, complicated manual extraction of data from the many different sources (pay, pensions, shares, benefits systems) and provides a single dashboard of employee pay comparison reports.

Ken Charman, CEO of uFlexReward, says: “Some organisations have miscalculated how long it takes to produce the necessary data to satisfy auditors’ demands for filing the new statutory Gender Pay Gap report. To hear that only a quarter of financial firms have reported their pay gap figures, less than one month before the deadline is quite surprising.”

Equal pay

At the same time, organisations are facing increasing scrutiny from the Remuneration Committees who, under the new Corporate Code of Governance, now need to see proof that companies are complying with their equal pay and opportunity policies. This is required across the complete spectrum of employee demographics, together with the factors that explain pay variation: grades, bands within grades, job definitions and others.

Charman says: “We’ve launched a Lite version of our service, uFlexLite that can bridge the gender pay ‘data gap’ for any organisation in as little as one week – all we need is an anonymised employee demographic file and a list of reward policies.”

Given the reporting deadlines, uFlexLite is a services project and instantly available without the long and arduous process of IT procurement. Without even needing to be onsite, a full Pay Equity file can be produced for an organisation before the filing deadline of 30, March 2020 for relevant public sector organisations, or 4, April 2020 for a private company or a charity. It will show all rewards for all employees, by all factors of comparison and analysis, in a secure form that cannot be traced back to individual employees.

“Many employers who have made progress towards equalising pay, will be caught out by the statutory gender pay gap system, which shows simple high-level ratios. With a complete picture of Pay Equity, they can protect their reputation by explaining and providing concrete evidence of progress that would otherwise be hidden,” concluded Charman.

Unilever ahead of the game

The launch follows news that Unilever has achieved its target of a 50/50 gender balance in managerial roles across their global business a year early. It also cements the importance of pay data as it strives to achieve gender parity in its top 14,000 management positions, up 38% from 2010.

Commenting, Leena Nair, Chief HR Officer at Unilever, said: “We’ve succeeded in reaching gender balance at management level, but our work doesn’t stop there, and we will continue to be a driving force in closing the gender gap everywhere.”