We are often asked to get involved because clients are not sure where to start. They may have identified an issue, or worse a member of staff has raised one: “why is he/she paid more than me?”. We also get involved when clients identify problems arising from business activities. The trick is to pre-empt those issues:

• Merging with another organisation and harmonising payscales or terms and conditions can be a hazardous activity. Get it right and no one will notice. Get it wrong and everyone will be up in arms. An equal pay audit (EPA) will help you identify what issues you need to resolve as part of the harmonisation exercise.
• Payscales appear fair but the client has feedback or complaints from staff and managers. Sometimes payscales no longer fit the bill. Managers go on to make practical decisions to solve immediate problems and then later down the line there is a visible issue. An EPA will help you identify what causes the issue, pre-empt future issues or give you a focus for when you are developing/changing your pay scales.
• Individuals have raised queries and made comparisons with other staff.   Its human nature to make these comparisons. An EPA will help you identify whether there is likely to be an issue in a specific cohort and may even help you pre-empt queries by highlighting where potential comparisons might be made.
• Trades Union/Staff Council/Consultation Groups have requested one. You’re all going to be singing from the same hymn-sheet in the end. A good outcome from your EPA will leave everyone satisfied that everything is already as good as it can be. A more difficult outcome will give you something to work from and help you identify hotspots and issues to resolve; it will also give you something to measure against in future.
• The GPG gap is disproportionate and a bit of a deep dive is needed to get to the root of the problem.  It has been highly recommended from the start that an EPA should follow on from GPG reporting.  People sometimes confuse GPG with equal pay - the former tells you the headline size of the gap, the latter tells you what's going on behind the scenes.

An EPA will cut your data in many ways, and highlight the areas on which you need to focus. Not knowing where to start often stops a process dead in its tracks. Having an action plan, or a focus for your activities, will give you the confidence to get started.  Be warned though – no EPA can dig into the records to find out what decisions where made and when to create a problem. It will only tell you the size of the problem. But at least you’ll know here to start.

If you are not sure if you need an audit, get in touch and we’ll talk you through it; that way you will know for sure.