You can help close your organisation's gender pay gap by identifying the drivers and targeting them through specific actions.
You should report your gender pay gaps in the same place each year and leave the previous years’ figures up for comparison.
Many organisations choose to report their gender pay gap alongside a commitment statement and an action plan.
An action plan demonstrates your commitment to closing the gender pay gap by providing a clear pathway of actions that you and your workforce are committed to. It’s a crucial step towards creating a fairer and more equitable workplace.
You can use the self-assessment tool to help get you started.
How detailed your action plan is will depend on where you are on your pay gap journey. If you are just starting out your action plan may only include one or two actions – this is ok!
You can create your own format for your action plan, or you can use the provided template. The step-by-step guide also has more details on creating an action plan.
Your action plan should include:
1. Commitment statement
A commitment statement is a short statement that reflects your organisation’s desire to reduce pay gaps and take meaningful steps towards addressing inequality in your workplace.
It is helpful to reflect some of the key work you have previously undertaken that you think has made a substantial difference to improve your pay gaps.
2. What you have measured
Make it clear what pay gaps you are reporting on (e.g gender, ethnicity and disability), what time period they cover and what methodology you are using (e.g. The Ministry for Women gender pay gap methodology). If you do not have at least 10 people in each group being compared, your data should only be shared with you HR team.
You may wish to publish a context statement alongside your gender pay gaps. This can help give more background information and any relevant insights or drivers of the gender pay gap.
3. Your goals
Your goals should be the overall outcomes you want to achieve. They should be broad, measurable, consistent with your organisation’s wider priorities, and focus on the key drivers of your organisation’s pay gaps.
You need to keep your goals achievable. If this is your first time developing an action plan it may make sense to stick to one or two goals. If you are further along on your pay gap journey you could think about how you can expand your goals further.
4. Your actions
An action is a specific time-bound step or measure that you will take to achieve the goals that you set. Actions are more granular and operational. They detail the “how” and “when” of the plan. They are practical and can be measured or tracked.
We recommend choosing one or two actions under each area. The actions need to be simple to understand, targeted, and time bound with a clear output that can be measured.
5. Share your action plan
Once your action plan has been developed and endorsed by your leadership team, you should make your plan easily accessible to staff either by email or on your intranet and publish it on your website to make it public.
You could also publish your data in your annual review.
6. Evaluate your action plan
Your action plan should include processes for monitoring your pay gaps and for measuring and evaluating the impact of actions you have taken against your plan’s goals.
Make sure the person responsible for monitoring and evaluating each action has enough time set aside within their work hours to complete this.
As well as tracking actions you should regularly monitor wider gender equity measures. These could include representation of women at different levels within your organisation, proportion of Māori, Pacific, Asian and MELAA employees receiving bonuses, number of disabled employees and other measures or goals that you identified as being important to your organisation.
You should also decide the point in the future when you might review and develop an updated action plan, such as every year or two years, to share your progress and make new goals and actions to continue the work.
Don’t forget to share and celebrate your success!