Background

The CEO of a large organisation knew that Gender Pay Gap reporting and the changing workforce composition meant reducing pay inequalities was an urgent business issue for his leadership team.

Challenge

While the CEO was fully committed to narrow the pay gap, improvements were still marginal because his team was spending a large proportion of their time analysing and tracking data that was historic. The CEO was worried they were not identifying the real problem areas and not spending adequate time implementing the necessary actions. He was concerned about the risk of potential equal pay claims and keen on understanding how he could use his limited budget to bring about targeted change.

Six month programme

The Hub identified an AI based solution that could carry out real-time pay audits to create fair pay in an ongoing manner. One specific business unit was selected for the pilot. Specifically, the solution helped the CEO and the HR team:

• Do comparator analysis that went beyond gender(it covered ethnicity and demographics)
• Analytics were available on a real time basis which helped HR business partners be targeted around support
• Modelling and predictive analytics helped them understand potential risks around equal pay claims and be proactive around addressing them
• The start-up was able to give the organisation an insight into what other corporates were doing with their data and some innovative actions that were being taken
• By converting risks into quantifiable figures, HR was able to get the attention of its business leaders and make progress on an on-going basis
• The CEO and the HR team had used a machine learning based solution for the first time and were pleasantly surprised at how easy the process had been

Outcome

The CEO found the pilot to be very effective and decided to implement the solution across the entire organisation. He was able to translate his goal of reducing the gender pay gap to specific KPI’s that were tracked on a quarterly basis. Having been exposed to the power of using AI & digital solutions that were cost effective, he tasked his HRD to explore further opportunities across other parts of HR.