Service Express Europe’s Gender Pay Gap Report 2022

The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 requires companies operating in the UK with 250 or more employees to produce an annual report on their gender pay gap.

Service Express’s people-powered culture relies on hiring and developing great talent. We know that a gender pay gap can have a negative impact on experiences and outcomes for our people, as well as the impression we give to new talent. This annual report aims to focus our attention on our existing gender pay gap and drive changes within the business that will reduce it.

The findings below will outline our current hourly and bonus pay gaps, along with the central themes the data presents and important work we’re doing to close the gap.

Overview

This gender pay gap report is a snapshot, valid as of 5 April 2022, and only includes our full-pay relevant employees. At this time, Service Express Europe employed 301 people.

As this legislation doesn’t affect US-based companies, the report exclusively covers our UK operations. It was also prior to our recent expansion into the Netherlands and Ireland. It’s important to distinguish that a gender pay gap report isn’t the same as an equal pay report, which analyses whether groups are being paid equally for the same or similar work: this data simply represents the difference in average pay across genders over the course of the financial year. As a snapshot from over a year ago, it also doesn’t account for substantial changes in the business within the last year, such as recruitment of women to senior roles such as Commercial Marketing Director and Heads of positions. Commission (as well as other incentives or awards) is also considered part of bonus calculations, meaning that some individuals’ overall pay, particularly those in the upper pay quartile, is significantly inflated.

What is our pay gap for 2022?

Hourly pay gap

The hourly pay gap is the difference in hourly pay (such as salaries and other payments) received by male and female employees as of 5 April 2022, as a percentage of the pay received by male employees.

Service Express Europe’s mean pay gap (sum of all the values divided by the number of values) is 23%.
Service Express Europe’s median pay gap (mid-point value when we sort our data in ascending order) is 26%.
The industry average (based on comparison of a mix of industry leaders and competitors) is a mean pay gap of 26% and median pay gap of 19%.

This data simply represents the difference in average pay across genders over the course of the financial year.

Pay quartiles

This is calculated by dividing the lowest to highest paid employees into equal quartiles, and then calculating the percentage of men and women in each.

In the upper quartile, 7% are women and 29% are men. The industry average percentage of women is 16.6%.
In the upper middle quartile, 14% are women and 28% are men. The industry average percentage of women is 28%.
In the lower middle quartile, 36% are women and 28% are men. The industry average percentage of women is 35.7%.
In the lower quartile, 43% are women and 21% are men. The industry average percentage of women is 40.5%.

Bonus pay gap

This is the percentage difference in bonus pay (including commission and other incentive awards) in the previous year running to 5 April 2022, as a percentage of bonus pay received by men.

In Service Express Europe, 83% of men and 73% of women receive a bonus.
Service Express Europe’s mean bonus pay gap is 28%.
Service Express Europe’s median bonus pay gap is 4%.

The industry average percentage of women in receipt of a bonus is 78.4%.

Understanding the gap

This data represents the low number of women in Service Express Europe in mid and senior management levels, as well across higher paid roles. Given that they are generally higher paid, it is also reflective of the low number of female technical experts in our organisation. And although the technology sector across the board has significant work to do in this area, it highlights that Service Express needs to put focus into improving the profile of women at leadership levels and in technical roles.

We can see that industry leaders such as Google and IBM have made much more progress, and we are looking at how we can learn from these organisations. As part of this, we will be working with the Chair of Women@Google in the UK to understand their programme, and how we can adapt learnings to our own context at Service Express. Challenging ourselves to do better is woven into the fabric of Service Express, and over the last year we’ve made real progress in beginning to address this gap.

Challenging ourselves to do better is woven into the fabric of Service Express, and over the last year we’ve made real progress in beginning to address this gap.

How we’ll close the gap

Driving gender equity

We’re committed to supporting a diverse workforce representing all beliefs and backgrounds to cultivate a culture of growth and belonging through our initiatives to educate, celebrate and integrate. Our company-wide commitment to this principle and the work we’re carrying out is central to reducing pay gaps and other gender inequities.

Our International Women’s Day celebrations earlier this year marked an important moment for us. As well as spreading awareness through webinars and workshops and celebrating the contributions of women through our leadership roundtable, we officially relaunched our Women’s Leadership Council.

The Council is a global forum, with the inclusion of all regional women colleagues, that will come together to drive gender equity across our business and place women’s issues and experiences at the forefront of what we do – we’re extremely excited to see the impact this group will have and to provide the support and community necessary to give it every success.

The Council so far has identified these obstacles to achieving fairer pay and equity that it will look to focus on:

Technical organisation recruitment (particularly to roles that sit within the upper quartile)
Entry-level recruitment
Management pipeline for female employees
Female leadership

We also recently hit an important global milestone in the completion of our diversity audit with the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce. This audit discovered that we’re at the ‘Developing Readiness’ level of our DEI work, by analysing our leadership commitment, policies and practices, workforce and supplier diversity, as well as community engagement and social impact. This analysis will help us to target our push for gender equity globally, as well as across other demographics.

Flexible working and well-being

Integrating the diversity of experiences different genders bring into our ways of working is another way we’ve started to reduce our gender pay gap. Empowering our people and cultivating a culture of growth is at the core of who we are, and we consistently invest in our people’s physical and psychological well-being.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the working world has changed, and we have evolved with it. Flexible working is a central pillar of our well-being investment, allowing our people to work in a way that works for them. We’ve also begun to recruit for purely remote roles, broadening our access to greater and more diverse talent, and we’ll continue to invest in tools to afford our people of all genders the trust to complete their work around the demands of their lives – not vice versa.

Women in full-time employment are nearly twice as likely to have a common mental health problem as full-time employed men, a considerable barrier to thriving in any organisation. Creating a space for open and honest conversations will help us to remove barriers, and to do this, we come together regularly in company webinars on topics that impact our people’s mental health and their work, including menopause, physical and emotional well-being and anxiety.

Other investments

Service Express Mental Health Champions: Trained colleagues who can identify factors impacting well-being and signpost toward further support.
UNUM Employee Assistance: A benefit platform that offers a range of support, including well-being support services, workshops, return to work support, and legal assistance.

Recruitment

Ensuring an equitable and fair process across for all genders when hiring and promoting will make a significant impact on our pay gap, and our Talent Acquisition team has been looking closely at how we can foster a more inclusive process for candidates, both internal and external.

There’s also a clear organisational logic in transforming this process: diverse management teams lead to 19% more revenue and 67% of candidates state the importance of racial and gender diversity. We’ll be equipping our hiring managers in the coming months with the skills and tools they’ll need to hire inclusively and start to make a meaningful impact on gender diversity, by challenging their biases and making inclusive outcomes a priority when hiring or promoting.

And we recognise that to retain any new talent, we need the tools and people in place to build and develop inclusive teams effectively. This means equipping our people managers to support difficult conversations, offering flexible working arrangements based on a diverse range of needs and spotting the unique sets of strengths that every Service Express employee brings.

Challenging our biases

A diverse workplace and customer base is a fact; working inclusively and with others in mind is a choice that we expect our people to actively make, every day. Alongside recruiting inclusively, our people need robust cultural intelligence to work effectively with people and customers from a huge variety of social and cultural backgrounds.

To make it clear that this is a priority, we’re rolling out company-wide cultural intelligence training for all colleagues this year, to start to develop awareness and ensure inclusive experiences for both colleagues and customers.

As leaders and people managers have a unique role in driving inclusion, they will also undertake Unconscious Bias Training with the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce. Through this, we’ll make a meaningful change in how we promote diverse viewpoints and skill sets across genders, ensuring the long-term reduction of our gender pay gap. Pay should be determined by the skills people bring to the table and their commitment to driving growth at Service Express, not their gender.

Pay should be determined by the skills people bring to the table and their commitment to driving growth at Service Express, not their gender.