Q&As from Live Pay Transparency Webinar
Question: What are the most common data quality issues organisations encounter when preparing for EU Pay Transparency reporting, and how can they be resolved early in the process?
When you’re gearing up for EU Pay Transparency reporting, three big data challenges tend to pop up – here’s how to tackle them:
- Job Architecture Gaps
Problem: Missing or inconsistent job profiles and grades make it hard to group roles for equal work analysis.
Solution: Standardise job profiles early and make sure every role has complete, consistent attributes across all countries. If you're struggling with this activity Kainos and Colmeia can provide support.
- Fragmented Pay Data
Problem: Pay components like base salary, bonuses, and allowances often sit in different systems, which creates challenges when you try to pull them together e.g. some organisations have some but not ALL benefits in Workday. This may also differ by country.
Solution: Either bring as much of this data into Workday or use this time to map out where this information may sit in your external systems. We’re seeing a lot of organisations use this time now to do just that, so that they have all the necessary information up front before a deployment, but ultimately before they begin their analysis.
- Missing Basics e.g. Gender and FTE
Problem: If gender or full-time equivalent fields aren’t mandatory or clean, you’ll hit compliance issues fast.
Solution: Configure those fields as mandatory in your HR system and run completeness checks early in the process.
Question: For companies that have not yet developed a robust job architecture, what are the first practical steps to get started—especially if we need to accelerate to meet the compliance deadline?
Define design criteria to match the structure of the job architecture with your objectives. For example, an equal pay-ready job architecture should include skills, competencies and grades. Using standard catalogues as templates can streamline the process, and consulting with experts helps to avoid common pitfalls.
Understand what data already exists and collect it. Using existing job descriptions as a starting point can help to generate organisational buy-in and foster acceptance for the project. Collecting existing data also helps to match the job architecture to the reality within your organisation.
Get the right tools to build or update your job architecture that enable you to maintain it long-term. Manually adjusting each job-profile is a daunting task, that can take years for entire teams. The right software enables you to generate and adjust the content you need, while improving data quality and increasing standardisation.
Question: If we have a UK office and a French office do we need to compare job equity over both countries (if we decide to adopt it in the UK)?
No – if it's to meet compliance as per the EU Pay Directive, you only need to compare within a legal entity per country.
Question: Is there a cost to have the Pay Transparency Analyzer go live?
The module is sold by Workday and Kainos deploy the module. The cost is based on scope of FSE, countries and number of external data points.
Question: Is there any functionality in the tool to accommodate a separate payroll file flowing directly into the system? Most of the benefits, OT, and RSU information sits within payroll rather than Workday.
Yes, it can digest all external Payroll data sources. This is the value the Pay Transparency Analyzer provides, as it will bring in this external data into Workday using the Prism platform. You don't need a separate Prism licence for this. Kainos will provide guidance and support through this process to set up the ingestion and scheduling to automate the ongoing input of data into the Pay Transparency Analyzer. This is standard as part of deployment. Kainos has additional offerings that can support more complex data landscapes or where you don’t have in-house skills. Kainos can build robust integrations between your non-Workday systems and PRISM to fully automate the ingestion of your Pay and Reward data into the Pay Transparency Analyzer.
Question: Is Article 7 of the Directive in place for all companies regardless of size?
Yes – Article 7, which is the right to information, is required regardless of how big or small the headcount is per Legal entity within a country.
Question: Is the Directive for all management levels? Example: Blue collar, white collar, etc?
Yes - The EU Pay Directive includes all levels of employees and is inclusive of Blue and White Collar roles.
Question: Can we withhold access to total reward info from employees on their profiles if they don't request it?
You are able to configure the Workday Pay Transparency Analyzer module to enable this approach.
Question: When including data from other systems, would it be through direct file upload (such as EIB), or would it require an integration with the other system?
There are a few ways to handle this. External data is brought into the Workday Pay Transparency Analyzer through Workday Prism, either by placing PSV files on an SFTP server for scheduled retrieval or by setting up integrations with your external source APIs so the data can be pulled in automatically. It is up to you as an organisation to decide on which option you're most comfortable with.
Question: What about data protection? As an example, only two people are in one job profile? Could they still make a request for information?
Disclosure under Article 7 is lawful because it fulfils a legal obligation. Data Minimisation Principle should be applied. Only share what is necessary (e.g., aggregated averages rather than individual salaries where possible). National transpositions of the EU Pay Transparency Directive are introducing country-specific thresholds and rules, including minimum numbers of employees per category to protect confidentiality; e.g. x people required per category. Where there are no local specific details in the legislation business decision is required as to where the threshold is set. This is configurable.
Question: Which translations options do we have in the tool? Is it all Workday delivered translations or can we control this ourselves?
The Pay Transparency Analyzer uses Workday’s delivered translations.
Question: What does Kainos propose we use as a Category of Work to run the regression analysis on?
Kainos cannot provide guidance on how you should categorise your workforce. Our recommendation is to consult with legal experts, such as Lewis Silkin or Willis Towers Watson, for advice on this. Once you have those recommendations, Kainos will work with you to incorporate the agreed workforce categorisation into the Pay Transparency Analyzer. Examples of fields that the Analyzer leverages to support your categorisation decisions are;
• Compensation Grade Profile
• Job Category
• Job Profile (with optional Legal Entity and Business Entity)
Question: What are our alternatives if we don't go down this route?
If you choose not to leverage Workday for Pay Transparency compliance, there are in general two alternatives:
Self-Build Process / Tooling: Develop an internal solution to collect, process, and report pay transparency data. This requires collating all data defined as compensation. Gathering all pay-influencing factors (e.g., tenure, performance, location) and categorising workers into comparable groups based on equal work or work of equal value. The Challenges of this include a high resource demand for design, development, and ongoing maintenance and increased complexity in ensuring compliance with evolving country-specific rules.
There are alternative Third-Party Products that are well-versed on reporting, but they don’t have the front-to-end solution specifically on the Article 7 requirements. They will still require similar full data collation and categorisation, plus integration with existing HR systems.
Using Workday minimises capacity impact because data already resides in the system, and new data will be brought in. The additional benefit of leveraging Workday is that you can leverage this data to inform other workforce analytics.
Recorded Webinar: Building Compliance from the Inside Out: A Practical Approach within Workday
In our recent webinar, industry experts from Kainos and Colemia take you beyond the headlines and into the practical realities of achieving end-to-end EU Pay Transparency readiness within Workday. Following the recent release of the Pay Transparency Analyzer, powered by Kainos, we explore what successful deployment, data preparation, and job architecture transformation really look like.