The challenge:
The South Yorkshire Pensions Authority required a thorough understanding of pay and benefits trends within the UK talent market.
This information was required to help them make the best decisions around remuneration with the goal of increasing their retention levels and improving recruitment.
They had previously identified, through the use of staff surveys, exit interviews and performance appraisals, that they had a potential issue around the competitiveness of their overall package. The authority lacked the necessary knowledge and in-house expertise to carry out the proper analysis themselves, so they approached Reed Talent Solutions to help them:
Benchmark salaries and benefits against the market
Analyse if their pay and benefits were objectively competitive or if they were falling behind the market
Provide recommendations to address recruitment and retention, and to support their long-term objectives
The solution:
Reed Talent Solutions carried out a comprehensive talent market analysis to create a detailed picture of UK trends.
To do this, we benchmarked the salaries of the 45 unique roles within the pensions authority. As this is not an exact science, to ensure the integrity of our findings we were careful to use multiple data sources, selecting the most appropriate data for analysis.
We also looked closely at the size and scope of each role to make sure the most accurate comparisons were made.
In order to achieve accurate benchmarking we undertook a through review of key information, helping us to build a picture of the size and scope of each role. This involved reviewing job descriptions, previous job evaluations, and grading structures and pay bands.
We then held stakeholder workshops with our client’s leadership team and trade union representatives. This helped us to understand the context of pay and benefits, and whether there were any parts of the authority which were struggling more than others with talent attraction and retention.
The information gained allowed us to map roles against common public sector pay structures, and to build alternative tiles for each role.
The salaries were then mapped against salary data, enabling comparison with public and private sector pay as well as UK ad local market medians. The authority’s benefits package was benchmarked with several anonymous organisations as competitors for talent.
The results:
Our final report contained a detailed breakdown of benchmarking results for both pay and benefits, information on salaries, benefits, and objective competitiveness of pay, and a number of recommendations around remuneration, organisational design, benefits, employee value proposition, and promoting from within.
We provided the pensions authority with accessible and easily digestible information around salary and benefits, and accurate data to base decisions on.
Assistant Director at The South Yorkshire Pensions Authority, Gillian Taberner, said: “The project was well managed, ran smoothly, and was in line with agreed timescales.
“The report and presentation were exactly what we were looking for. Overall, it went very well.”
Find out more about our salary and reward benchmarking solutions, or get in touch with one of our experts to talk through your needs.
