iTrent Salary Modelling: how public sector organisations can benefit

Powered by IBM Planning Analytics, iTrent Salary Modelling offers a welcome addition to the toolkit of HR and finance teams. It enables accurate budgeting and planning in the face of even the most complex staffing arrangements. Crucial for any organisation looking to reshape its remuneration strategy, the solution allows you to explore your options, and quickly assess the impact of changes before you implement them. 

Here’s how iTrent Salary Modelling can prove invaluable to public sector HR and Finance teams… 

1. Easier, more accurate budgeting 

For most organisations, the pay bill tends to represent the lion’s share of ongoing expenditure. Seemingly minor changes to overall pay can have a big impact on your annual budget. 

We understand that your pay policy can be a complex beast. If nationally-applicable rates, defined progression steps, parental leave or early retirement are not planned for effectively, or if there’s a data-entry error, it can significantly skew the accuracy of your budget figures. 

For those managing such complex business processes in excel, it can be extremely challenging and prone to errors: keeping the data accurate can mean countless hours wasted on changing and updating multiple spreadsheets held in different locations. It’s error-prone and eats into valuable time and resources. 

With iTrent Salary Modelling, all your pay budgeting is in one place. Simply enter national pay grade changes or salary increases and the planning tool does the rest. You can immediately see the impact of the change on a granular employee/departmental level, as well as on the pay budget as a whole.

2. Greater scope to test new remuneration options

Budget-wise, iTrent Salary Modelling certainly delivers an accurate ‘as is’ budget based on your existing pay structure. But equally as important, it provides a user-friendly canvas to explore possible changes. 

The Hutton Report on Fair Pay encouraged organisations to think a little differently when it comes to public sector rewards. There’s a special emphasis on reducing disparities between the lowest and highest paid, and on ‘earn back’.   

In reality, you may have a longstanding and pretty rigid pay spine in place, made up of a relatively large number of narrow grades, some of which may be subject to national bargaining arrangements. You need the tools for visibility and clarity over salary changes that drive meaningful change across your organisation.

iTrent Salary Modelling provides a sandbox to play around with possible changes to your existing policy. It gives you scope to ask questions, such as: 

• What would be the comparative cost of pay rises at different rates?
• Instead of across-the-board rises, what are our options for focusing increases on particular departments/roles?
• How might revising our pay bands help us to address lowest/highest pay disparities and gender pay gap issues? What are our options for introducing a living wage threshold?  

The capabilities of iTrent Salary Modelling mean you can quickly and easily create a scenario for each option for side-by-side comparison that take your organisation forward. 

3. Governance and transparency 

From a governance perspective, it can be difficult to supply your data in an accurate, timely and transparent format that can be comprehensible and relevant to a variety of audiences.

iTrent Salary Modelling comes with visualisation options to make your data easy to understand. A report based on your salary plan can be as detailed or as topline as you want. You can create personalised, multi-page reports to meet the needs of various stakeholders: ideal for meeting the needs of a diverse range of audiences and reporting in line with government guidelines.

4. Creative thinking: embracing an agile, local approach

Let’s say you want to hire or reallocate resources to meet a new need in the community. Actually making those changes can be a long, bureaucratic process. The need might well be acute, but it can sometimes take months - if not years - to actually get people in-post. There are also obvious financial restraints to consider: what are our options for diverting staff and filling in skills gaps, while still staying on-budget? 

The beauty of iTrent Salary Modelling is that it gives you scope to get creative with different scenarios and come up with possible solutions. For instance, on first glance, hiring two new employees to meet a new local need might seem too much of a financial stretch. However, further analysis of that department’s HR data reveals that a number of employees are due for retirement in the near future.  The modelling tool gives you scope to rapidly assess possible recruitment options in light of these circumstances, including implications of hiring at different banding grades. Armed with a fully-costed report, you have everything you need to present the figures to stakeholders, secure a green light on the proposal and to put your plan into action.     

iTrent Salary Modelling helps you optimise your pay spine, ensuring it is aligned to your goals and flexible in market conditions and changing circumstances. For more fundamental remodelling of your pay structure, we can also offer tailored modelling and analytics advice.