People Inc. Features
Social Mobility and HR
Social Mobility is becoming an important part of key business strategy for Companies in the UK in addition to gender, age and ethnic diversity. A New study carried out by the Social Mobility Commission found that UK Professionals from working-class backgrounds are paid £6,800 less on average each year than those from more affluent backgrounds.
Research carried out by the London School of Economics and University College London found the gap was caused by a number of different factors such as employees from poorer backgrounds less likely to ask for a pay rise, or because they do not have access to the same networks and opportunities as their more affluent colleagues.
In recent years, only the most forward thinking employers have turned their focus to the social diversity of their workforce, in an effort to access talent they were not accessing from their traditional approach. Many companies however, could be missing out as they may not be accessing potential talent because of lack of consideration of the social mobility of their employees. Additionally, it may well be that a lack of social diversity is a factor for applicants when making informed decisions about the organisations they choose to work for.
With this in mind and the fact that more attention is turning towards Social diversity by the Government, companies may find the need to prioritise this as part of their business practices. The difficulty seems to be that unlike measuring gender and ethnicity there are very few recognised methods for recording and measuring social mobility of the workforce without generating an increase in workload on the HR function.
agathonhr have been working with some of our People Inc. customers to provide the tools to not only capture the social diversity of their workforce but also to analyse the results. This has been in the form of an online questionnaire that employees can complete as part of Employee Self Service functionality. The results are captured automatically so that they can be quickly analysed by the HR Department using specifically designed reports.
Read our casestudy about Online Questionnaires using People Inc. HR