The Plunkett Pay Equity Framework Step 6 – Update Continuously

The thing about pay equity is that it is not something you can achieve, declare victory, and then comfortably rest on your great effort and results.

Pay equity is dynamic. The potential for pay gaps arises every time you hire someone, someone leaves, and when there are changes to compensation like raises and bonuses. This brings us to the final step of the Plunkett Pay Equity Framework, the one that never really ends: update your pay equity analysis throughout the year.

It also means it's important to regularly review and update your job structures, job descriptions, and any other compensation data you use to determine hiring pay and raises or bonuses. The essence of Step 6 is lather, rinse, repeat.

If you are thinking this sounds like a lot of work, it all depends on your data and tools for reviewing and analyzing pay equity. It also depends on having a solid pay philosophy and strategy to lean on when your analysis shows that there are issues to look at further and address.

Here's why it's worth it.

1. Pay equity is the law and the right thing to do.
2. Pay equity is for everyone. Pay gaps that may not create legal risk because they do not involve any inference of discrimination based on a protected class are still inequitable. If people are not making the same pay for comparable work, this can cause expensive issues with both attraction and retention. That's part of why it's so important to also understand the market data and benchmark your pay against similar organizations.
3. A commitment to pay equity is a commitment to fairness, transparency, and caring about doing the right thing.
4. When you Get Pay Right, improved culture and engagement often follow. This is because performing a pay equity analysis allows you to ask broader questions about policies and processes that can be easy to ignore because they are simply the way things have been done in the past.

Seeing things from an equity perspective allows you to make positive changes that benefit everyone and are good for business.

To understand how your organization can assess and maintain its pay equity status on a continuous basis, request a personalized demo of our pay equity solution.