With the recent attention on closing gender pay gaps and organisations moving to focus on pay review and salary surveys to ensure they are being competitive in the industry job market and to ensure they offer enough benefit to retain hard-working staff. HR departments may be left feeling like there is a lot more administration to carry out to fulfil all managerial requirements when it comes to salary benchmarking and other important remuneration reviews.

Technology is making this easier however, with the use of salary software which keeps all details centrally for HR to make monthly salary payments easier and reduce the previously high bank fees that occurred when paying salaries or moving money between accounts. This is in addition to further financial technology which has come to market offering better rates for lending and making or receiving card payments.

What’s the Benefit of Fair Pay?

Fair pay is extremely important, not just to employees, but it has a knock-on effect on organisations as well, ensuring they are better able to retain great employees and improving employee morale across the company. This leads to an increase in productivity which has a direct impact on the profits the company generates. However, fair pay doesn’t necessarily mean equal pay, instead the highest performing companies implement bonus schemes, paying out to employees that greatly contribute to the company ethos and encourage productivity. This has shown to have a direct impact on employee attitudes to work and has shown to be more efficient for motivating employees than adjusting pay structures.

In some companies, where pay structures are levelled to a base rate, it was found to send the wrong messages to active employees; that hard-work won’t be actively rewarded while those who drift along, doing the bare minimum expected can continue to do so in exchange for a standard yearly pay rise.

While some companies actively discourage their employees from talking about their wage, employees who foster strong relationships in the workplace may discuss this openly with each other. Fair pay ensures that employees will be able to see the hard workers who are financially rewarded and in theory, model themselves after top performers so to improve their own earnings. This avoids environments where hard-working employees feel underappreciated because they haven’t been in the role long enough to earn a higher wage compared to employees who don’t work as hard but have held the position for a longer time period.

How Can Technology Help Remuneration Be Fairer?

Technology has made it easier than ever before for all information to be kept and compared centrally by managers, administrators and HR departments so informed decisions can be made on work effort and manager feedback. This is especially helpful for medium to large businesses with large numbers of staff and managers spanning several departments which may have previously taken weeks if not months to collect and analyse information. If you believe you could benefit from using software like this for your employee pay review, click here for more information.

What Can Be Expected with Future Technology?

While developments are still being made in the way payments are made and salary reviews are carried out, the future could change with the implementation of smart AI systems that are automatically trained to adjust pay scales and bonuses or rewards depending on manager feedback. This has the potential to save companies huge amounts in regard to time and resources, allowing personnel to allocate more time for improving company relations and internal relationships between staff and managers. IBM are the forerunners of this particular technology, already utilising their internally built AI Watson Analytics who uses current employee data to predict what individuals will be able to offer the company in the future to base pay and bonus decisions.

With the increased number of millennials in the workplace (one of the loudest generations crying out for pay transparency and fairer pay) organisations and new businesses would do well to implement salary surveys and pay reviews regularly to ensure employee morale remains high. In addition, they can tailor benefits to prospective staff, increasing their chances of hiring great talent while retaining their most dedicated active employees. Are you a business or organisation looking to make pay fairer across your workforce? Don’t struggle with numerous physical and digital reports, centralise today and save both your managers and HR admin time, money and resources.

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