Friday Coffee Talk from Planet Fair

Three years ago, the watchmaker Breitling conducted fair pay analysis for its largest employee population, based in Switzerland. The results gave them an appetite to do more, so they began a global analysis across dozens of markets. Rewards and performance lead Nadja Sirotkina tells Henrike about the lessons the company has learned.

Margrét Bjarnadóttir gets to us from Total Rewards 24 in Cincinnati with some exciting takeaways from the conference.

Now in its fifth year, the UN Global Compact’s Target Gender Equality Accelerator program supports employers working towards equal pay and workplace gender diversity. In this coffee talk, Margrét learns more about this program from the UN’s Salma Houerbi.

What happens when an employer can’t adequately explain why an employee’s pay is what it is? Or what if their explanation is based on “the old way” of doing things? In this coffee talk, Margrét and Henrike discuss pay bands, pay philosophy, the EU pay transparency directive, and how to minimize confusion while trying to close the gender pay gap.

In this coffee talk with Henrike von Platen and Dietmar Knoess of the PUMA group, we hear about both the pleasant surprise and the challenges in PUMA’s journey into fair pay leadership.

It’s intuitive that a gender pay gap would leave women feeling less than satisfied in the workplace. But according to Sana Zafar, our coffee talk guest, the real effect is more nuanced. Pay gaps lead to lower satisfaction among both women and men, but through different mechanisms.

University of Iceland Researcher Thora Christiansen has been looking into why, despite Iceland’s intensive work on pay equity, there are still so few female CEOs. In this coffee talk, Thora joins Margrét to talk about her research into this problem—and a few possible solutions.

Systematic bias is stubborn. Demographic pay gaps can still remain, even after companies do a pay equity analysis and give raises to underpaid employees. But based on recent research by Margrét and her co-authors, there’s a better way to close the gap: structured pay equity analysis. Margrét and Henrike discuss in this week’s coffee talk.

Looking for a bite-sized introduction to the EU Pay Transparency Directive? This week’s coffee talk breaks it down in simple terms. Watch the episode now!

To achieve and maintain pay equity, you need to ensure that compensation across countries, provinces and states, and cities is fair and equitable. But how do you do that?

In this week’s Coffee Talk, Henrike von Platen and Margrét Bjarnadóttir talk about the Reykjavik Global Forum, where Henrike’s key takeaways centered on sentiment toward women leaders, the impact of rising costs on gender equality, and measures we can take to improve.

With a batch of fresh ideas to share, Margrét and Henrike dig into key takeaways from the Conference Board’s Executive Compensation conference—including how short-term executive incentives may not be incentives at all.