Pay Equity and Pay Transparency

At WTW we have a global community of pay equity and transparency colleagues to help you become more confident on pay equity and transparency. They are supported by a global hub of statisticians, and economists, and by pay equity analytics software, alongside Embark employee communication software.

Why are pay equity and pay transparency so important?

Pay equity and pay transparency are important because your employees expect to be paid fairly. They are part of being a responsible employer and running a sustainable business that can attract, retain and engage employees. Employees’ rights to equal pay are now being reinforced by increased pay transparency regulations across many countries.

Pay equity and pay transparency are complementary.

• Pay equity ensures that employees are paid fairly based on their work and qualifications.
• Pay transparency provides clarity to employees on their pay relative to other employees’.

We believe that pay transparency encourages pay equity.

Being confident on your pay equity is fundamental to meeting the wave of new pay transparency requirements in the U.S., Europe (the EU Pay Transparency Directive) and beyond.

Compensation and remuneration committees and business leaders do not want greater pay transparency to bring unexpected costs, employee reactions or other risks. They are looking for assurance that pay and benefits systems are delivering pay equity and/ or steps are being taken to make them ready for greater transparency.

How we partner with you

We offer full support to help you become confident of your organization’s pay equity and readiness for greater pay transparency. We partner with you to develop a sustainable approach, wherever you are located and in a way that best meets your needs.

We combine decades of deep expertise in employee rewards, analytics and communication with market-leading software. This matters, as confidence in pay equity and pay transparency is about more than analytics, it is about having an objective job and rewards systems and managers and employees who are well educated and confident on pay.

How delivering pay equity helps organizations be ready for greater pay transparency.

We can partner with you at each and every stage on pay equity and transparency.

• Ambition and plan

  Through a series of workshops, we help you articulate your goals on pay equity and transparency, plan how you are going to get there and develop the supporting business case.

• Analytics

  Our suite of pay equity analytics identifies where you have issues and the remedial actions needed. We can run the analytics for you, or we can equip you to run the analytics yourselves. We use PayAnalytics software (or your chosen software provider).

• Action

  We identify where individual pay adjustments may be required and what broader pay management enhancements are needed. We can help you strengthen your job architecture and leveling frameworks, tighten your reward structures and supporting policies to enable fair and equitable pay decisions by managers.

• Communicate

  We partner with you to develop your narrative on pay equity, and the roadmap and materials needed to engage and educate leaders, managers and colleagues, so all are ready for greater pay transparency.

Pay equity analytics and software

We have a suite of analytics to help you identify where you may have pay equity issues, what is causing them and where you need to act. In addition, we support compliance with local regulatory reporting.

For regular pay equity analytics, we use the market-leading PayAnalytics software (or, if you prefer, your favored software):

• The analytics identifies where you have unexplained differences in pay between employees, what’s driving them, which employees are impacted and the costs of closing gaps.
• This is done easily and cost-effectively within the software, using a multivariate regression model.
• We tailor the model with you to best reflect how pay is managed in your organization and your priorities for the analytics.
• We provide you with outputs that are easy for your rewards teams to work with along with key messages for leadership.
• We use the outputs to determine what individual pay adjustments may be required and what broader pay management improvements may be required to ensure issues do not recur.
• If you want your own software license and run the analytics yourself, we will support the transition and equip your teams.

How we partner with you to meet the EU Pay Transparency Directive

We offer full support on preparing for the EU Directive. Currently, most clients are at the planning and analysis stage. We can help you with:

• Educating stakeholders: We can run workshops for your stakeholder groups to familiarize them with the provisions and begin to work through the implications.
• Assessing readiness: We have developed a fixed cost “EU Pay Transparency Directive Readiness Checklist” that comprises a mix of quantitative and qualitive assessments, making it easier for you identify the key gaps between current state and where you need to be. Working with you, we use the insights from the assessments to build a high-level roadmap and the supporting business case.
• Planning: We can help you map out the team structure, roles and responsibilities in preparing for the Directive alongside detailed plans.
• Data and analytics: We can help you build your internal analytics capabilities. This includes support in selecting a software provider, building process maps, and creating analytics guidebooks.

Worldwide pay equity support

Our local pay equity teams can also support you with all your local or regional compliance requirements.

Keep updated on global regulation

Looking to keep up on the latest pay equity and pay transparency developments you can visit and subscribe to our Global News Brief page. We will share monthly updates on the latest developments around the world.