Unlocking Equity: A Glimpse into Managing EU Pay Transparency in Workday
Are you ready for the upcoming EU Pay Transparency regulations?
With the looming EU pay directive approaching, HR teams are trying to juggle many competing priorities. This is the biggest pay equity legislation in the last half-century. No wonder, when asked, half of our HR clients said they felt utterly overwhelmed by the changes, while the other half said they were blissfully unaware.
For those thinking this only affects larger EU companies, take a moment to consider. The majority of the obligations affect employers with even a single employee in the EU . The upcoming compensation cycle will likely be the last merit cycle to make pay adjustments to accommodate for EU Pay Directive.
Key Priorities for Compliance – Where to start?
Meeting the requirements of the directive isn’t going to be a walk in the park. Many companies have never conducted pay gap reporting, developed salary bands, or prepared information for pay requests. Your HR department may soon start to feel overwhelmed. Let's not mention the internal employee communications around transparency.
All sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Let's take a breather and focus on what we already do have - people data. Data integrity plays a key part in driving real change. Human Capital Management (HCM) systems, when optimised, can empower you to know where to take meaningful action toward pay equity in the workplace.
The Role of Data Integrity and Workday
HR teams are already busy. Our HR teams are no strangers to one small query on pay resulting in back-and-forth, looking in different systems, and figuring out the factors that have impacted pay. We see many EU pay equity products on the market that will deliver against the specific requirements of the new directive and support future planning and pay strategies. But what about the HR workstack you already have?
Now is the time to ensure that your Workday system is optimised, bringing the true value it has to offer. This will not only make your employees' and HR's lives easier but also get your business processes and data in order ahead of any future solutions for pay equity. Remember, you are already investing in and paying for a premium solution – make the most of it.
Preparing for the EU Pay Directive
From experience, while the intention when implementing HCM systems is that they are the single source of truth, competing priorities, capacity, organisational changes over time, and workforce constraints mean that your HR workstack may not be in the best shape. Now is the time to get the most from it. Above all, it’s the best place to start.
5 Key Actions to Get Started
- Familiarise Yourself with Quality People Data: Ensure your teams can trust and interpret your existing metrics easily.
- Utilise the Full Power of Workday: Optimise your plans for pay equity by leveraging all features of your HCM system.
- Review Key HCM Areas: Focus on having all the essential data in place e.g. tenure, time in role, promotion and merit history, absences, qualifications, skills, learning, locations etc.
- Connect Compensation Structures to Job Data: Ensure compensation structures are identified and connected to grading and a structured detailed jobs catalogue.
- Seek Expert Consultation: If you still feel overwhelmed, reach out for a free 121 to discuss your current state, and which tools will be best placed to help you become ready and compliant by 2026.
