How HR claimed a seat at the boardroom table

Driving efficiency and best practice

Keeping on top of changes also applies to employee handbooks – the kind of manuals companies use to inform staff about their vision, mission and values, as well as rules on matters such as leave, flexible working, sickness and redundancy. They are also likely to address issues such as health and safety, diversity, equity and inclusion, data protection, harassment and grievance procedures.

For an individual to research and update every page in such a handbook is clearly extremely time consuming, arduous and open to error – particularly when there might be differences for employees in different locations. The Brightmine Automated Handbook Management software can analyse a client’s existing policies and organisational profile and alert them to legal changes and anything that’s missing. It can also create a revised version of the document with new suggested text, so organisations can ensure they are complying with federal, state, and local jurisdiction-specific requirements.

All of which drives efficiency by saving on time, as well as the cost of external help. Freed from such administrative compliance tasks, HR leaders have more time to spend on other matters – such as feeding into corporate strategy and decisions to improve talent strategies or reduce risks.

Another aspect of compliance – as well as being good practice – is gender pay-gap reporting. In the UK it is a requirement for companies with 250 or more employees to submit a gender pay-gap report every year. And it is set to come into force in the Netherlands by June 2026 under the European Union Pay Transparency Directive.

The Brightmine Pay Equity Analytics tool makes it easier to analyse your organisation’s pay data, identify any areas of unequal pay for specific demographics and understand what might be causing them, to inform sound remediation plans. Organisations can pull the relevant information from their payroll systems and upload it on an anonymised basis. The application can then assess whether employees are being paid fairly across all characteristics and markets. It is subsequently possible to model scenarios to close any gaps and form an action plan for more fair and equitable pay structures.

The Pay Grading tool then enables users to benchmark pay levels against market rates and build a market-indexed job architecture to support consistent and fair practice ongoingly. “All our products can be used on their own, but this is a good example of how they also come together,” says Assistant Vice President, Market Planning & Product at Brightmine, Emily Mackenzie. “Pay Equity Analytics helps you understand issues in your organisation’s current pay practice. Compensation Planning allows you to link those with market rates to create (and maintain) improved pay structures. And the HR & Compliance Centre sits behind them both with best practice guidance and training materials on areas such as benefits, payroll, minimum wage, and compensation policies.”

Attracting and retaining the best talent

Compensation Planning is built on the Brightmine pool of salary data, contributed directly by customers. In the UK alone has the salary data of over 1.5m employees across 26 different functions, drawn from over 1,000 organisations, and is updated every month. The regular rolling updates ensure that Brightmine’s data is significantly more current than traditional annual surveys can ever be, making it a much more reliable guide to current pay levels across different skillsets.

Brightmine has developed machine-learning “classifiers” to automate the matching of client data with corresponding roles in its data structure – traditionally a time-consuming task for reward professionals. The efficiency of this process makes it easier for customers to update their data frequently and allows for the creation of structured pay hierarchies and pay grading structures, linked to market benchmarks. “Historically, the design of a pay grading structure would have been done by consultants, often on six-figure contracts,” says Mackenzie. “This technology allows us to offer an alternative solution offering greater flexibility at a lower price point, delivering an overall better outcome for the customer."

The wealth of data Brightmine has also enables it to offer a Collective Labour Agreements tool in the Netherlands. Based on over 2,000 current and accurate labour agreements and pension information, which can be accessed via the HR & Compliance Center or delivered straight into customer systems via API.

The fight for the best talent is so intense today that companies need to be sense checking and benchmarking their pay and benefit offerings on a regular basis. What’s more, new rulings in the US on pay transparency mean that in some states companies now need to publish their salary offers in job postings – creating a much faster and more visible flow of information. Given the current level of demand for data scientists, for example, if you’re trying to recruit someone at last year’s rate, or even the rate at the start of the year, you’re not going to be competitive because the market has moved on.

"The world of work is changing rapidly and it’s important for HR leaders to keep ahead. Our tools support effective talent planning by helping customers compare pay at their organisation against market rates, and model out the impact of any changes. This helps to ensure that the compensation packages they offer remain competitive."

That was the case for the National Deaf Children’s Society, which was looking to be among the first in its sector of British charitable organisations to embark on new ways of rewarding work and high performance. With the help of a dedicated product expert from Brightmine, they used the Compensation Planning tool for “pay grading, salary benchmarking data and creating a sustainable and fair pay model”. Similarly, the UK’s Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund used Compensation Planning to benchmark its salaries and was impressed with the application’s “up-to-date data and information” to support “today’s ever-evolving workplace challenges”.