Our latest Gender Pay Gap report

Achieving Gender Pay Gap Parity at Socitm Advisory?

Matt Gascoigne (Chief Operating Officer) and Andy Campbell-Critchley (HR Director)?

The key deliverable in the Socitm Advisory 5-year Diversity & Inclusion strategy for 2022 relates to equal pay. We’ve been very clear about our ambition - by the end of 2022, we will be fully confident that all employees will receive equitable pay for roles with equivalent skills across all areas of our business. In terms of the gender pay gap, this means we are aiming to maintain a differential of +/- 5% in mean pay, which will allow for acceptable variances in salary based upon things like tenure, experience, qualifications, and remit.?

To focus our attention and measure both progress and success, we have tracked our gender pay gap position monthly since July 2020. In March 2021 we voluntarily reported our position to HM Government and were pleased that our efforts to that point had seen us land with a +8.1% variance in mean pay (a positive indicating a position favouring our male population). ONS guidance for an SME is to be within +10.1%, so 8.1% represented a solid staging point for further improvement.

Following our submission, we dived deeper into our position to better understand the wider context relating to median pay - which sat at +16.1%. Our business, at this time operated with a gender balance of 67% male to 33% female (a better position than the Technology Consulting sector in general) so our median position showed our more senior posts (with matching salary) were more likely to be held by our male employees.

Having recently prepared and submitted our pay gap position for 2021/22, we are thrilled to share that the hard work and focus over the last 12 months have seen huge improvements to both mean and median average pay. Our mean position drops to -2.8% and our median position drops to -3.5%. Both indicators fall within our +/- 5% tolerance, are significantly better than the expectation for a business of our size operating in the technology environment and represents a healthy swing towards a greater level of equality in pay differentials.

We analyse our data at several important points, reflecting the structure of our business. This allows us to shine a light (and look at tactical activity) into those areas where action is most needed. In this way we can see that our position within the Consulting population (mean at -8.7%) is in a healthier position than our Operations business (at -26.1%). Or that our Client Services Director/Principal Consultant (-4.3%) and Senior Consultant (+5.1%) hierarchy grades are pretty close to where we want them, whereas our Consultant population, at -22.3%, requires understanding and focus.

So, what have we learnt about the factors that underpin this data? We know that the breadth of role within Operations, from IT Technician to Marketing Manager, Finance Assistant to Bid Manager, makes achieving parity a challenge. We have also understood that the different levels of entry into the business (Apprentice, Graduate, Consultant) can have a significant influence on the outcome. Promotions and salary reviews, when handled proactively and consistently, are a fantastic tool to effect better results and help address the gaps.

The progression in our results has not been achieved by chance. Working towards the March deadline for our voluntary submission to Government has given us an opportunity to focus on this priority objective in a more co-ordinated way. Publishing clear pay bands by grade, and proactively ensuring there are no outliers has set the parameters that are delivered within a more clearly defined annual review structure. This is all underpinned by quarterly business wide Talent Management sessions where our management team peer review staff and encourage enhancements

From an attraction perspective, we have worked hard to make ourselves an organisation that appeals to potential employees with flexible requirements – including hours, work patterns and wellbeing support. Whilst our aim is to appeal to the many, this has had a positive effect on attracting ‘return to work’ parents and our female to male ratio that now stands at 36% to 64%.

Enhancing our management behaviour and activity has been a real focus across our business in the last year – which has delivered several benefits! With more comfort in sharing feedback, development of staff has gathered pace leading to promotions and reward.

Our journey over the last 12 months has shown a steady positive trend, each month moving towards parity. Now we are within our tolerance, we recognise we need to work even harder to maintain our position. The introduction of a comprehensive flexible benefits programme, as well as building on other established initiatives such as targets for in year promotions within our corporate plan, continued emphasis on talent management, enhanced career mapping and further developments to flexible working conditions, we are optimistic that these planned activities should maintain gender pay gap parity, even as our headcount grows towards 150.