Pay equity represents a strategic opportunity to drive tangible business benefits — if approached with the right framework and tools. But, although many business leaders report seeing the value in pay equity, many still haven’t elevated it to a priority level.
For 71% of business leaders, implementing pay equity initiatives is a reactionary compliance exercise rather than a strategic initiative. But the real untapped value of organized pay equity data comes from its potential for strategic workforce planning.
That’s why we assembled a panel of experts to challenge the prevailing perspective and examine pay equity as an opportunity rather than an obligation. During “Achieving Pay Equity: Connecting the Data Dots,” I was joined by Michelle Dervan, CEO at SkillsTrust, and Lydia Wu, former HR executive and expert in people analytics, AI, and the future of work. During the conversation, we uncovered the business value buried in pay equity data.
Check out the highlights of the webinar below or watch the full session on demand.
A unified view of workforce data allows you to tackle pay equity challenges head-on. But one of the major challenges HR teams face when working on pay equity is that pay data is often scattered across multiple systems, such as HRIS, payroll, CRM, and project management tools. Manually gathering and integrating this data is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors.
Furthermore, HR doesn’t always own all the data needed for a comprehensive audit, adding another layer of complexity. “Every time you do an analysis, it almost feels like a political capital bargaining situation,” Lydia said, “because you have to say, ‘Okay, who owns this system? How can I get them to send me the data?’”
Most organizations store pay equity data in fragmented point solutions or legacy tools, like spreadsheets. But that isn’t the only option anymore. Instead of manual data collection, you can use automation to regularly bring data into a single, unified platform, like Acterys, creating an efficient and reliable source of truth.
Consolidating workforce data holds business benefits beyond pay equity compliance. With all your data in one place, you gain deeper insights into workforce planning, making it easier to align talent needs with business goals. This kind of data consolidation ultimately leads to better decision-making, improved transparency, and a more engaged, fair, and agile workforce.
A well-defined job architecture provides a consistent framework for evaluating roles, ensuring that pay decisions are objective and transparent. By standardizing job levels and responsibilities, you can more easily identify and address pay disparities, laying the foundation for fair and equitable compensation across your organization.
Yet many businesses don’t have this framework in place. “[You] need something that’s objective and gender-neutral, but also intuitive and easy for companies to implement,” Michelle said.
Invest in establishing a comprehensive job architecture and evaluation framework based on objective, gender-neutral factors such as skills, responsibilities, and working conditions. Convene cross-functional stakeholders to define job categories and evaluation criteria, ensuring buy-in and alignment across the organization. Additionally, document the job evaluation methodology to demonstrate its objectivity and defensibility. Transparency is key to ensuring that employees and regulators understand how pay decisions are made.
Developing a job architecture isn’t just a compliance exercise. Michelle believes that standardizing a framework like this will lead to a more strategic shift in HR operations. “This is a really valuable, fundamental piece of architecture,” Michelle said, “to be able to have a career framework, to explain to employees how to move up through the organization, for workforce planning, for succession planning, and even just for forecasting your salary run rate.”
This positions pay equity as a strategic priority rather than just a compliance burden.
The steps to achieving pay equity also empower you to be more aware of what you’re spending on compensation. The right pay data, slotted into an objective framework, gives you much more visibility into the skills and talent you’re currently paying for, and how you can optimize that spend based on business needs.
Compensation is a significant line item for your business, Lydia pointed out — and that’s an investment that needs to be very intentional and strategic. But you can’t make better decisions until you know exactly where your compensation budget is currently being allocated across projects, roles, and skill sets. Seeing the data can reveal where you’ve overindexed resources on a lower-priority project, for example, and enable you to reallocate talent to higher-value work.
Configure your data centralization platform to enable scenario planning and analysis, allowing you to predict business needs and make informed compensation decisions. Comprehensive dashboards help you visualize and communicate talent decisions to executives and other stakeholders.
The impetus for investing in data centralization and job architecture may simply be to maintain compliance. But that isn’t the only benefit. Bringing together disparate data, building a clear job architecture, and visualizing pay decisions are all building blocks of a robust talent strategy designed to propel your business forward.
To learn more about pay equity analysis, watch the full webinar on demand.
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