Friday Coffee Talk from Planet Fair

This year's WorldatWork Total Rewards conference is over, and before flying out, Margrét fills Henrike in on all the exciting insights she gained from the event. These include focusing on job architecture to prepare for upcoming regulations like the European pay transparency directive, shifting from a job evaluation to a skill evaluation approach, and implementing AI in the compensation space. Listen to this extra Coffee Talk episode to get all the details!

The need for workplace gender equality is global—but business environments and local requirements vary tremendously from one country to another. This means that one-size-fits-all approaches and advice can often fall short. And any program that aims to help employers worldwide move towards fair pay must also be able to offer a highly individualized approach.

This is exactly the kind of program that the United Nations has set out to create. On this week’s coffee talk, program lead Salma Houerbi joins Margrét to talk about the UN Global Compact’s Target Gender Equality Accelerator.

Henrike brings a challenging case to the table for this week’s coffee talk. She’s been deeply involved in helping companies prepare for the EU pay transparency directive, and the directive requires companies to establish pay bands. The directive will also allow employees to ask for a comparison between their pay and the pay of their co-workers.

This means that employers must be able to explain to each employee exactly why their pay is what it is.

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.

The pay gap is a well-known problem—but Margrét and her research collaborators are always looking for better ways to solve it. This week, Margrét tells Henrike about her new article in the Harvard Business Review. Written with PayAnalytics co-founder David Anderson and research partner David Gaddis Ross, the article describes a fresh and more effective approach to closing the pay gap.

The Coffee Talk team is back with renewed energy to discuss the piece of legislation that all European companies are talking about: The EU Pay Transparency Directive. Discover the key takeaways of the Directive and the first steps your company can take to comply.

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?

Lightning round. In this week’s Coffee Talk, Henrike von Platen and Margrét Bjarnadóttir talk about the Reykjavik Global Forum – Women Leaders,  which was held in Reykjavík on November 13-14, 2023. At the Forum, each session was short—and Henrike moderated an 18-minute session with four panelists on a particularly urgent topic: The rising cost of living.