I’m not talking about Equal Pay here rather the challenge of being in HR and navigating pay issues when we have access to more information than your average member of staff.
This can be a difficult situation, and something I grappled with a few times early in my career. When we join an organisation, our starting salary is as much dictated by the pay level of our previous role as it is by the organisation’s expectations or experience of roles at that level, add into the mix the knowledge of a recruiter and you generally start a bit above where you were and roughly in the right place (hopefully). But then you get started, and let’s say you are in a role where you are responsible for pay data and pay reviews, you become aware of where your pay (or the pay of the HR team) sits in the internal rankings of roles. We might start thinking about equal pay here, remembering the bin men and cleaning ladies of Birmingham City Council. We might consider the salaries of a usually male dominated function such as IT or a business core function such as Finance and look for comparators.
A well-developed organisation will have this all in hand, with pay bands and job families to allow for horizontal views across the organisation, but not all cultures are big enough to complex enough to be there. Perhaps you are the first HR person and this will fall to you. So how to handle it if you learn that your pay is lower than others you would consider peers, could you or should you rely on information you gained during your role which would not be available to other non-HR staff? Let me tell you how I handled it.
I joined an organisation as a manager at the same time as the equal role within IT who joined on the exact same package. I negotiated a pay package which felt like a good uplift from my previous role and suitable for the level of additional responsibility I was taking on. Along with the salary was an annual bonus of a decent size, plus access to the corporate car park (a significant city centre benefit). All was well. However, within a few weeks of joining I was sent a letter from finance confirming that there were some changes being made to benefits and the bonus scheme and car park access for my role (and others of a similar level) was being removed. “Right”, I thought, “not as good as I hoped”. At the same time, I was working on the annual pay review and was very aware of the pay levels of the other roles who had lost their bonus and car park too – there were significantly higher than my salary (like 25% higher). But I had an issue because I only knew this because I had the knowledge from working in HR, and my IT peer didn’t. So, what to do?
I wrote a carefully worded and considered email to the FD, along the lines of –
“I joined with the package agreed in good faith, the salary I negotiated at the time included the bonus and car parking. Since this is no longer part of my package, I would like my salary to be reconsidered. I also am aware (through my role) of others at this level whose pay is in excess of mine. Whilst there may be many reasons for this – length of service and delivery level – I also feel that I was mis sold the package. If I had known that the bonus and car park would not be included long term I would have increased my salary expectation sufficiently. I would therefore ask for consideration to be given to increase my role from £x to £x (an increase of 20%) to take into account the loss of the additional elements. I would also point out that my IT colleague is in the same situation and I therefore think it only fair for their pay to be increased by the same amount.”
I hadn’t discussed it with my IT colleague but it seemed fair and reasonable, and thankfully the FD agreed. They were impressed with my measured approach and agreed with the reasoning and the increase was applied.
It felt tricky at the time and I considered long and hard before sending the email, but on reflection it felt like a purposeful request based on fairness.
Perhaps this will be helpful to you if you are in a similar situation. Although I can’t guarantee the same response, I wish you well with it!
Photo by tommao wang on Unsplash