The guarding and FM contract company Sodexo UK has published its ethnicity pay gap data for 2020. The company says that it’s the first in the hospitality and FM industry to do so.
Sodexo says that it’s committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace, and in 2019 pledged, through Business in the Community’s Race to Work charter and through the INvolve/EMpower ethnicity pay gap mandate framework, to publish its ethnicity pay gap.
In July 2020 Sodexo was among businesses that signed an open letter headed by Audeliss & INvolve and pledging to act and report on its progress annually. Hence a 2020 pay gap report; and its ethnicity pay gap data, which shows Sodexo’s mean ethnicity pay gap is 5pc. Sodexo has now included pay gap data for three ethnic groups: Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnic backgrounds, as it recognises that publishing the combined pay data for these groups may hide disparities between the groups.
Over the last year the contractor has created a strategic taskforce made up of leaders from Black and other ethnic backgrounds to lead on company-wide changes, such as the launch of its Be Heard series of listening groups. Developed for Black colleagues to share their lived experiences of working at the firm, the first series has resulted in plans developed for each of its business segments.
As for gender, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on business and requirement from government to exclude furloughed colleagues receiving less than their regular full pay from the data3 has resulted in a slight increase in Sodexo’s 2020 mean gender pay gap from 14.12pc in 2019 to 14.36pc in 2020.
Sodexo says that it has an established gender balance strategy and throughout the pandemic maintained focus on gender balance. It was one of the first to publish its gender pay gap data in 2016, ahead of government legislation introduced the following year requiring companies with over 250 employees to do this.
The annual publication of its gender and ethnicity pay gap findings will become standard practice for it, Sodexo adds.
Sean Haley, region chair, Sodexo UK & Ireland said: “We feel strongly that the first steps towards achieving our diversity and inclusion goals are transparency and holding ourselves publicly accountable.
“There is a lot of work to do to improve parity in both gender and ethnicity, but only with this level of clarity and the impetus to have more open conversations, can we put measures in place to move our organisation in the right direction and to do better by our colleagues and the communities in which we operate.”
Its plan for the UK and Ireland includes:
– targets to increase ethnicity representation in senior leadership positions;
Achieve 43pc (currently 37pc) representation of women in senior leadership by 2025;
Reduce mean gender pay gap across all legal entities combined to 10pc or less by 2025;
Continue to monitor pay practices;
Create more sponsorship and development programmes for females and unrepresented ethnic groups;
Undertake a diagnostic review into attraction and progression strategies; and
Conduct an employee census to increase our ethnicity data, and improve quality of data.
