Why use pay equity software?

It is equally important to understand that the impact is not only at an individual contributor level, but for supervisors who must now manage staff with behavioural competencies that were perhaps neither expected nor needed in the past. 

In managerial roles within an organization, it is now more important than ever to understand best practices for successfully navigating, improving, and implementing documented processes that outline both subtle and significant job description changes. This process is crucial for efficiently and consistently recognizing the relative importance of behavioural competency changes in terms of how they may now be impacting the required skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions that describe the job to be done, and what compensation fairness looks like.

Understanding the Canada Pay Equity Act

In August 2021 the Canadian Pay Equity Act came into force for all federally regulated workplaces in Canada. Organizations with 10 or more employees must by law post a final pay equity plan by September 3, 2024.  This means they should now be proactively examining their compensation practices and developing detailed plans for creating and maintaining a ‘pay equity plan’. 

So, what’s the issue?

Well, traditional job evaluation methodologies have not been ‘keeping up’ with the changing subtleties and expectations of a modern workplace. Remote work opportunities, non-traditional work hours, defining and measuring what ‘effort’ looks like, the subtle need for emotional intelligence in some roles or having the skill to manage change in others are only a few examples of what makes jobs different today. Legacy job evaluation methodologies are simply too limited in their measures to adequately recognize these changes, and too fixed or static in their design to adapt.

An alternative approach to dated job evaluation methodologies such as Hay would be for a solution to understand, and be scalable with, the nuances of the new work environment to support the business’s compliance with federal requirements. Competency-anchored and objectively measured pay equity software will more succinctly and precisely measure and compare work across the organization while being detailed enough to enable accurate, defensible results that reduce analysis time and achieve better results proving pay equity compliance. 

What should a modern pay equity software solution provide?

Modern job evaluation methodologies should also be software-dependent to turn the gathering and analysis of job data into job information that integrates with other HR management processes that are logically dependent on having quality job information, including:  

1. Always having current job-specific accountabilities and behavioural competencies.   
2. More effectively recognizing where subtle differences between jobs should be appropriately compensated.  
3. Generating reports that can more thoroughly prove each job evaluation result is logistically consistent and defensible.  
4. Engaging employees in a process generates results they can understand. 
5. Evaluating jobs with such precision that future, inappropriate ‘classification creep’ is minimized. 
6. System-generated job postings and candidate interview guides based on job data that have been compiled and converted into behavioural job competencies.  
7. Creating the opportunity for organizational management to consistently and objectively hold incumbents accountable for the job they are paid to do. 

Has your organization considered adding these features into your current approach for ensuring pay equity compliance? Have you assessed the benefits of updated, modern pay equity software to help your organization run more efficiently and cost-effectively?