Our responsible business commitment to ensure fair pay, reward and recognition for all our employees.
We will ensure our executive salaries are reasonable and justifiable. Aiming to reduce the gender pay gap year-on-year.
Desired impact – To achieve our vision to be the company people want to be supplied by and want to work for, we will have an engaged and motivated workforce.
How have we performed?
We are an accredited Real Living Wage employer and regularly check our compliance. External benchmarking of pay and benefits across our industry, region and competitors for skills and experience is undertaken in a planned approach across our diverse workforce.
For the first time, our approach to the annual pay review this year was to consider a pay award more targeted to assist with the cost-of-living crisis. Our aim was to provide an award that would recognise our employees’ contribution over a challenging 12 months and the Staff Council and Unison supported this view.
The recommended pay offer provided employees in the lower salary bands, which make up more than 75 per cent of our employees, with an average salary increase of 7.4 percent. Including all salary bands, the average salary increase was 6.6 percent across all employees.
Our commitment as part of the five-year People Plan to focus on a ‘Thriving and Diverse workforce’ continues with positive results and a continued focus to continue to deliver more.
The number of women joining South East Water at entry grades has increased by 12 per cent over the last two years. Last year 57 per cent of all new starters were women.
As highlighted in the Gender Pay Gap data for April 2022 published in March 2022, the gender pay gap has increased by 2.8 per cent over the last year to 22.6 per cent.
The median pay gap remains at 23 per cent. Where our gender pay gap has been impacted in the last year is maintaining and increasing the number of women in our management teams. Given the relatively small size of our management team and our desire to retain an experienced and stable team, it doesn’t take much movement for it to disproportionately affect our gender pay gap. We have seen a drop in women in manager grades by four per cent.
The bonus structure in place meant that a greater proportion of women, 50.8 per cent than men, 15.9 per cent received a bonus, however the mean bonus gender pay gap was 79.3 per cent this year and the mean bonus difference was 30.7 per cent.