October 2022
In the ninth episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series for 2022, Lucy Lewis speaks to Ritu Mohanka, Managing Director and Head of EMEA at Syndio, a leading workplace equity platform.
In this episode, Ritu shares her fascinating insights into how data can be used to drive workplace and pay equity and how businesses are responding to increasing pressure from stakeholders, employees and legislators to address systematic bias in the workplace.
Ritu discusses the important role that communication and transparency have to play in building and creating high workplace trust and considers some of the key factors driving the creation of pay gaps, including the ‘opportunity gap’. She goes on to explain why data driven decision-making is one of the most important components for future strategic decisions, pushing it to the top of HR’s agenda.
Turning to intersectionality, Ritu explores how this poses particular challenges when assessing and tackling pay gaps and illustrates the different approaches employers are taking to address these. Finally, Ritu and Lucy discuss the role that pay transparency legislation has to play in driving change, and how multi-national companies can navigate their global obligations from a cultural and regulatory perspective.
In Conversation with…Ritu Mohanka
Series 2: Episode 9.
Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to The Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation With…’ podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment Team and in this podcast series, I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge, to rethink who, how, what and where we work, but whilst the pandemic has been a significant catalyst for immediate change, it’s only one of the many drivers of change in the world of work. Diversity and inclusion is something we’ve discussed regularly on this podcast series this year, including with our last guest Dr Lordan, who is the Founding Director of The Inclusion Initiative, but in today’s podcast we’re going to be looking specifically at how data can be used to drive workplace and pay equity and how businesses are responding to the pressure to address systematic bias within the workplace. And I’m really delighted to have with me today, Ritu Mohanka. Ritu is the Managing Director and Head of EMEA at Syndio. Syndio is a leading workplace equity platform. Ritu has more than 20 years of experience in senior leadership roles within HR and talent focused businesses. She is the winner of multiple awards and has been recognised on the EMpower Top 100 Ethnic Minority Senior Executive lists on several occasions. Ritu is passionate about making workplaces more diverse, more inclusive and more fair and I’m really delighted that we’re able to have this conversation today.
Welcome Ritu.
Ritu Mohanka: Thank you, Lucy for having me. I’m delighted to be here.
Lucy Lewis: I wanted to start just by asking you to introduce yourself, but also telling us a bit about what Syndio does.
Ritu Mohanka: Fantastic. Well I’m Ritu Mohanka, Managing Director of Syndio, a global workplace equity platform. As Lucy suggested, I have more than 20 years of senior leadership experience within HR and talent focused businesses and my passion lies in making workplaces fair for all. I’m originally from India but I’ve had the pleasure of working and living across various countries in Europe including Paris, Munich and Vienna and I’m currently based in London and live with my husband and two sons. Syndio’s core mission is to help companies build an equitable workplace for all and its equity analytics platform with 220 plus clients, including 30% of Fortune’s Most Admired List, we truly help industry leaders analyse and resolve pay equity and opportunity gaps. Most importantly the platform identifies root causes and areas that demand really tangible action rather than a generic peanut butter spread approach to DE&I that lacks true impact, but most importantly Syndio can truly help organisations get ahead of the trend towards transparency and I am so proud to say that Syndio helped return 115 million dollars in the last year alone to employees across the US as part of our efforts to close pay gaps. That’s real, and the impact it has on people’s livelihoods and their confidence in the workplace is massive.
Factors driving pay inequality and pay gaps
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. Totally fascinating. I really can’t wait to get into it and it’s particularly interesting for us because we’ve been talking a bit on the podcast about the Edelman Trust Barometer, that businesses retain this standing as a trusted institution. And we’ve been talking about responsible business and trust in the future of work, and I know one of the things that you are particularly interested in is the idea of systematic bias and pay equity and I’d love to hear a bit from you about that idea of systematic bias and why you think it’s so important.
Ritu Mohanka: Absolutely Lucy. The way that I see that is, as leaders, we’re on a very short leash in terms of being able to keep up people’s trust but we have an opportunity and a chance to do even better so I really genuinely think doing things like communicating about pay equity and your median pay gap, that’s the absolute number one way to garner trust from your people. I always say Lucy, trust and transparently are two sides of the same coin. Research has shown numerous times that when companies are transparent around a commitment to fairness in the workplace it makes a difference in the minds of employees but on the flip side when there’s no transparency, employees really start to fill the void often, of course, with misinformation. I think striving towards a fairer society and truly equitable workplaces is long overdue and we know that addressing systemic bias and pay equity are key to making this a reality. Many businesses are talking the talk but deprioritising walking the walk for whatever reason it is. And for me, it should be given that everybody should feel valued and treated fairly regardless of their personal background.
And if you think about why, why trust is even more important. It’s even more important as employees are increasingly leaving jobs where they feel unfulfilled, overlooked and undervalued and in a challenging economic climate, it’s also not surprising we’re starting to see an uptick in strike action that reflects the sentiment too, particularly this is very relevant to the UK as such. And a simple and effective way trust can be created in the workplace is to systems which ensure pay transparency and proactive monitoring. For example, promotions and pay rises should be reflected upon holistically by looking at data to ensure that a particular group of employees are not being short-handed and, at the minimum, sharing pay bands or salary bands for job roles will kick-start a culture of openness. And then of course it’s good for businesses in general, the motivator for working towards pay equity may sit with external pressures from employees, stakeholders, the government or perhaps concerns of a reputational cost. So many of the organisations we work with to address the equity challenges have really reaped the business rewards too. More motivated workers, less churn, lower recruitment spending and even the PR benefit of making the company look like a better place to work. So even though pay equity should have intrinsic value, it is undoubtedly good for the businesses too.
The intersectionality challenge when assessing pay gaps
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. And that’s a great segway into what I really want to get into talking to you about and that’s pay equity. Because you know, we both know, that companies across the world are grappling with pay gaps at the moment. In my practice as an employment lawyer I have so many questions about how you manage or how you reduce a pay gap. In your experience, and I know you’ve got an awful lot of it, so in your experience what do you think are some of the key factors that are driving the creation of those pay gaps?
Ritu Mohanka: Absolutely Lucy, I always say pay gaps are not the same as pay inequities and it’s really important to know the difference and measure both. When groups of employees who do substantially similar work are paid differently due to their gender, ethnicity, race, that’s a pay inequity. When those inequities are not completely accounted for by differences due to neutral job-related policies or practices the pay inequities often require more attention. However, pay equity often isn’t the biggest driver of a company’s pay gap. In fact some organisations can solve the pay inequity issues but may still have a very persistent pay gap, but addressing this is where many organisations start in their efforts to close the pay gap and simultaneously address other important concerns, which takes me to the opportunity gap. So what is the opportunity gap? So another cause of the pay gap is in equal access to opportunities when underrepresented groups of employees don’t have access or equal access to jobs, promotions, or opportunities to collaborate on high profile projects and other forms of advancement, it hinders their chances of moving into higher paying roles and this leads to companies with a lack of representation at the highest levels of the business and also a long term negative impact on employees’ earning potential. So similar to pay equity, opportunity equity is also largely within an organisation’s control, and to improve opportunity equity companies must evaluate their recruiting, hiring, onboarding and promotion policies and ensure that they are consistently enforced for all employees and candidates.
However when I think about what are some of the key causes for pay gaps, starting pay, or pay equity even. Starting pay is the single most important factor in a pay equity analysis according to labour economists. If organisations control the starting pay from the beginning one can have 100% pay equity. I also want to point out that different trends in employee movement are also a factor. Men are more mobile and that also adds to a gender pay gap, particularly if you think about in large companies. You’ll have women with longer tenure and their pay doesn’t keep pace with the market. So if a company is hiring more men and their pay is not in line with the current employees then people who are loyal to the company may be earning less than people who have recently been hired. Pay differentials among different functions are another contributing factor to the pay gap. For example, if you think about IT employees, traditionally male dominated, may be paid more than HR employees, traditionally female. While function based pay differentials are typically informed by talent market dynamics, company policy does play a role and then where there are significant gender imbalances across functions it’s useful to evaluate whether and why the organisation subscribes appropriate value for the outputs of the work performed. Question whether gender jobs are valued differently and if those justifications are valid. Not from the perspective of what the work is worth on the external labour market, but internally relative to other functional outputs.
And finally, there are some employee driven factors that contribute to the pay gap. The so called ‘labour supply’ facts and, while these aren’t fully within a company’s control, there are things you can do to address the problem. Some companies may draw in more men or white people due to how the industry or company brand is perceived. In this scenario it’s really important to partner with corporate branding teams in working to change these public perceptions. This is not an easy task but it’s important that the perception is going to change. If your organisation begins to see trends like this, it’s really critical to try and understand why. By digging further into what’s driving the pattern you may find opportunities to build in more inclusive policies such as parental leave instead of maternity leave or onsite day care to address some of those issues.
Apologies Lucy, that was a very long response to your question.
Lucy Lewis: It was an excellent response and really fascinating and I love the idea of opportunity equity and the examples you gave to really, really bring that to life. Completely fascinating.
Having illustrated the problem and having illustrated it so brilliantly I guess that takes us to how you go about addressing the issue and I know that your experience, your background, is on how you can use data. So a data driven approach to finding a solution and it would be great if you could spend a couple of minutes just explaining to us why a data driven approach is important and how it can help.
Ritu Mohanka: Sure thing Lucy. Every CEO and Chief HR Officer I’ve recently talked to has one big topic on their agenda. Data driven decisions. The ability to evaluate and use data well and effectively is the most important component for future strategic decisions. So when thinking about workforce equity, look to the data for answers. Are promotions or succession planning favouring one group of employees over another? Are all your high performers representative of a certain gender or race? Do you have pay gaps when comparing peer employees? Data allows you to see these widespread trends or gaping holes. It also helps when it comes to aspirational goals like diversity hiring. You really need to understand first where you stand today to know where you’re heading and what’s even within your reach. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so companies must make sure that they have the most accurate and updated employee data and some of the key data fields, such as some of the demographic information, work experience and quality of work or performance rating for some organisations. Companies must then be rigorous about bringing in and using the most robust statistical analysis so they can identify some of these wage disparities. And a statistical analysis can also help to determine some of the root causes of pay discrepancies and determine what practices or policies are responsible for discriminatory pay gaps.
One of the most common examples we see, Lucy, is we are paid for performance but, when organisations do the analysis, they see a stark indifference to that, that actually data suggests that we’re not. So this is really an ongoing process which can’t be looked at just once a year. It’s not a pay audit. It needs to be continuously assessed because disparities will transform and shift throughout the year. Consider how annual bonuses might throw things or, especially timely in the current climate of redundancies. So many failed DEI initiatives are based on trial and error or are measured by tools like employee surveys but by the time you’re asking employees how they feel or waiting to see if your new policy has worked, it’s already too late. So the data that is relevant to your company is hugely empowering and helps you take meaningful actions before your employees leave, your shareholders ask you questions, you perform poorly on your pay gap report or all of the above. So we’re definitely starting to see more and more organisations analysing pay equity more frequently and catching on the fact that, if treated as an ongoing process versus a checkbox exercise, pay disparities can be prevented and that’s what leads to data driven decisions.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. Thanks Ritu. That’s really interesting and really interesting the idea that an ongoing analysis of data can support you in taking preventative action, as you say, as opposed to this once a year audit. I wanted to pick up on something you said because it reflects questions that we get, mostly with my employment law hat on, but you talked about “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and we both know that one of the challenges around measuring is the idea of intersectionality. How everybody comes with their own unique and interconnected set of circumstances and somebody’s advantages or disadvantages can’t really be explained through the lens of just one factor, so their gender or their ethnicity. There’s a whole totality of factors that influence the experience that they’ve had and the opportunity and I’m really interested in any thoughts you might have about how businesses can bring that idea of intersectionality into the idea of pay equity.
Ritu Mohanka: Totally, completely, Lucy. Couldn’t agree more. One of the challenging things with assessing pay gaps is intersectionality and as you said, exactly as you said, everyone has a unique and interconnected set of circumstances and someone’s disadvantages or advantages in life can’t be explained with reference only to one factor such as their gender or ethnicity but will come down to the totality of all the factors. I’d love to share some trends that we’re seeing that is also covered in our detailed trends report that I’m happy to send across later on. 98% of Syndio’s customers analyse both gender and race but companies are increasingly interested in demographics such as age and sexual orientation too. And our recent report also found that 26% of our customers are planning to look at age in the next cycle of equity analysis. These companies truly want to make their workplaces fair and equitable for all so they are embracing intersectionality in order to achieve this rather than seeing it as another hoop to jump through and we really expect that this sort of intersectionality analysis will only expand and grow.
And truly Lucy there’s no one size fits all for fixing diversity in practices. Disparities may impact us for several reasons outside of gender and ethnicity and if our goal is to create fairer workplaces for all we must fulfil this pledge to all and, as the economic volatility increases, many companies face belt tightening or even layoffs. But unlike the last recession this time workers hold an unprecedented amount of power. So companies are also dealing with acceleration in pay transparency legislation, a louder voice from employees seeking to be heard and rapidly evolving ESG disclosures and active proposals around human capital and hence we keep saying “start where you are and build on it”. Using the excuse of data or lack of is just not good enough any longer.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. Really interesting and really interesting to hear about those trends and actually the broadening of the sorts of data that people are analysing to get to a place of more confidence around pay equity. You talked about some of the legislation that we had in the UK, as you know we have gender pay gap reporting and there’s been a moment of quite a lot of discussion in the UK about whether that should be expanded. So, whether the mandatory obligation to report should be extended to other characteristics, for example, ethnicity or disability and I talked to Andrew McGowan on a podcast last year and we had a very interesting discussion about the role that government can play, and there’s no doubt that gender pay gap reporting in the UK has made senior business leaders focus on pay equity in a way that they probably hadn’t before. And I know that Syndio and the Fair Pay Workplace presented a report on the state of pay equity laws in the US and it touched on this issue. So I was wondering if you could share – I’m sure the report was very detailed – but just some high-level thoughts on whether you think this type of legislation is actually a good thing for pay equity or not.
Ritu Mohanka: Accountability requires measurement and targets Lucy but currently the reporting ask in the UK has achieved very limited change in real terms and the most recent report suggests that this pace we will be waiting another 100 years before closing the gap. So equally a lot of legislation, as you rightly pointed out, remains quite voluntary for many or is played with by down options. So another example is the quota in Europe for the number of women on boards is 40% at board level and 30% in ranks. So why not both? It’s too easy for organisations currently to hit goals and legislation targets but there needs to be really a lot more.
So at Syndio we don’t deny the limitations of the pay gap as a tool to measure equality but identifying your own pay gap is a really powerful starting point for change and what’s crucial is that this shouldn’t be the only tool businesses use. Change needs to be designed unique to your own organisation and needs, to be critical of so many other aspects such as hiring practices and promotion processes and retention and senior representation. So again back to your original question Lucy, I think having some of these laws help but there needs to be a lot more.
International legislation and the impact on pay equity
Lucy Lewis: And actually in answering you’ve touched on another really difficult issue for employers. You talked about there are different laws in different parts of Europe and no doubt globally and we see, as employment lawyers, if you’re a multinational business, tackling these different requirements in different countries is enormously challenging. I wonder if it’s something you’ve seen in practice and if you’ve got any thoughts about that.
Ritu Mohanka: You know Lucy we hear this every single day from the global organisations we work for and it is a challenge and it is worrying and we always say to organisations “don’t worry”. Do we have to start all at once? Absolutely not. And that’s what we’re seeing with various global organisations we work with. They start small. Focus on what’s really important and then scale overtime.
Companies that are not yet ready to do a full on global analysis for various reasons can always start by beginning to prioritise those countries where they have the most employees or perhaps the most active pay equity legislation and, after developing and defining their pay equity analysis process in those specific countries, they can then start to think about ‘how do we rule out a global programme by onboarding other countries other time’? So while you can take a multitude of approaches what we are seeing is that normally organisations do either a country by country analysis or we can create workspaces in Syndio’s equity platform with different permissions so that organisations can operationalise the uploading of data into different workspaces through different HR platforms because often we hear Lucy, “we don’t have one HR platform, we don’t have data all in one place”. So for example, a colleague in France can have access only to the France workspace while the core team could have access to all the workplaces globally. For countries with smaller work populations, for example, you can configure regional workspaces reflective of the movement of pay in that region while controlling for individual countries in addition to other controls apply.
Also I think that there is one thing that I’ve taken away from doing this work and learning from my colleagues doing this work constantly globally is that it isn’t a lift and shift. There may be different dynamics at play in compensation in Japan than in the US for example. So you need to account for that. Companies should really tailor their model so that it’s really capturing and accounting for the differences in pay practices and policies and your practices and policies may be different based on cultural differences and cultural readiness. So don’t just plan on taking your US policy and doing the same thing in Singapore because it’s a different context. You want to localise it not only from a statistical perspective but also from a cultural perspective and I would advise being really thoughtful and working with the local team to figure out what’s going to resonate with folks and what’s going to be meaningful. And here are some very early results from our 2022 workplace equity survey which we conducted recently by Syndio which shows that 20% of the organisations do analysis in each country, 35% do a global grouping scheme and 20% do both and the balance of companies surveyed so far are in the process of expanding from a subset of their population, which includes certain countries and not others, to a global analysis. And it’s truly a journey in terms of starting small and then scaling.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. Excellent. Really excellent advice and really interesting to see how cultural differences can play through and the one size fits all, although tempting, is probably not very sensible.
We’re coming to the end of our discussion. I’ve got a couple more questions to ask you and, one of them, I know lots of people listening will be thinking “well once we’ve done our pay equity analysis and we’ve taken on the advice that you’ve given so far, are there any practical steps that you think businesses can be taking to address any bias that they identify exists in their system?”
Ritu Mohanka: For sure. I think some great, easy, first steps are being transparent and making salary bands known for job roles throughout the organisation. So the first thing to do is ongoing education. We have to continuously make sure those frontline recruiters and talent acquisition people, who are the face of the company and the brand to the prospective candidates that we want to hire, are knowledgeable enough to speak really intelligently and understand the process changes. And so for example, not asking those specific questions around salary expectations or current salaries during the employee recruitment or hiring process, that’s really key. They should provide a salary range when they first start that conversation because we all hate when we get to the end of the interview process make an offer to a candidate and they say, “oh sorry, that doesn’t meet my expectations”.
Secondly, inclusive recruitment and talent sourcing are absolutely essential to make sure you’re not hiring for similar networks all the time and preventing welcoming recruits from a range of diverse backgrounds. Workplace equity communications is not simply publishing a few data points on your website. There’s a real art to aligning your communication to your brand and company goals and it’s really important to understand those nuances of different conversations with each of your audiences. So for example, you want the managers at your company to be prepared to answer questions directly from your employees but that really requires sharing clear, consistent information about your workplace equity strategies directly with them, not in a company wide email at the same time as the rest of the employee base. You’ve really got to empower and enable those managers. Your first step should be deciding what areas you want to cover and what you should share with each audience and the company can cover a variety of points. So just giving an example, companies like Sales Force who are trail blazing equity practices particularly in their communication efforts, in March 2021 when Sales Force posted its 2021 equal pay update, they also published their equal pay strategy for the first time and together the posts aimed to help employees and the general public learn more about their pay philosophy, how they approached the analysis and the results and their President, Chief People Officer, Brent Hyder said “our North Star is our values, and one of our core values is equality. As part of this we remain deeply committed to equal pay”. Starbucks is one of those companies totally trail blazing in this area, who have done some really neat things around data visualisations and have created infographics that lay out their best practices and tools that Starbucks uses to achieve 100% pay equity.
I could carry on Lucy, but there’s just so many different things, but it often starts with transparency and building trust.
Lucy Lewis: Fantastic and actually that’s a lovely piece of advice and it brings us to back to what we were talking about right at the beginning which was responsible business, trust and transparency being absolutely key to the future of work.
Future of Work
Lucy Lewis: My last question is one that I’ve been asking all of my guests on this 2022 podcast series.We all know the world of work is going to look completely different in ten years’ time, probably in ways we can’t predict now, but if you had the power to ensure one change for the workplace of 2032 what would it be?
Ritu Mohanka: You know it’s my personal mission, Lucy, if you can see if you can really eradicate inequalities, inequities and have really diverse organisations truly, truly equitable practices and inclusive cultures, irrespective of any protected demographic categories, organisations won’t use data or their lack of as an excuse to conduct regular and proactive analysis where it becomes the DNA of the organisation, where they can constantly in real time check on their pay equity representation and their movement. There’s a great Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now. So with great determination and movement surely one day equality will be achieved.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you so much Ritu. It’s been really, really fascinating and I love that Chinese proverb. Very timely as we all look ahead and grapple with the challenges as we come out of the pandemic. Thank you.
If you’re listening and you’d like to find out more you can visit Syndio’s website at www.synd.io and you can visit the global workplace equity platform by visiting www.synd.io/global-workplace-equity-platform.
Thank you again Ritu very much indeed.
Ritu Mohanka: Thank you Lucy for having me.