Gender Pay Gap Report April 2022

Gender Pay Gap Report 2022

A word from our CEO

"Our purpose is to improve the lives of our colleagues, our clients and our communities in a sustainable way and diversity and inclusion and narrowing our gender pay gap is a key area of focus for us. We recognise there is more work to do to reduce our gender pay gap further and have put strategies in place to achieve this important goal." Chris Horne, CEO

Find out more about Azets

At Azets, we are a people led business, and we are committed to promoting diversity and creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can achieve their full potential.

The UK Government requires all employers with 250 or more employees to annually disclose their gender pay gap using the following metrics:

Mean gender pay gap
Median gender pay gap
Mean bonus gender pay gap
Median bonus gender pay gap
Proportion of men and women receiving bonuses
Proportion of men and women in each pay quartile

The data in our gender pay analysis, taken at 5 April 2022, has been calculated using the standard methodologies set out in the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.

Understanding Gender Pay

The gender pay gap is not the same as equal pay. Equal pay is about ensuring that men and women performing the same or equivalent work are paid the same, whereas the gender pay gap is a statistical calculation which looks across all roles, at all levels within the organisation.

Commentary

Azets has a mean pay gap of 29.72% and a median pay gap of 20.63%. We have seen a small improvement of 2.47% to our median gender pay gap and a widening since our last reporting of 0.45% to our mean gender pay gap.

We have a gender split of 46% male and 54% female across the business overall, however in all three of the lower quartiles we have a higher proportion of females. Our gender pay gap develops as careers progress, with our upper quartile being comprised of 64% males compared with 36% females.

At Azets, people in Partner roles are employees of the business and are included in our gender pay gap data. In many of our competitor businesses, Partners are not employees, and their pay data is not therefore included in their statutory gender pay gap reporting although is sometimes reported in other publicly available information. Taking that information into account, Azets mean gender pay gap including Partners is often better than our competitors.

Our Gender Pay and Bonus Gap Data

	Mean	Median
Pay Gap 2022	29.72%	20.63%
Bonus Gap 2022	61.81%	70.00%

Pay Quartiles

The proportion of men and women in each pay quartile.

Upper Pay Quarter

%Men	64%
%women	36%

Upper Middle Pay Quarter

%Men	42%
%women	58%

Lower Middle Pay Quarter

%Men	34%
%women	66%

Lower Pay Quarter

%Men	43%
%women	57%

Bonus Recipients

	Male	Female
Proportion of males and females receiving bonuses	13.2%	7.9%

Commentary

Azets has a mean pay gap of 29.3% and a median pay gap of 23.1%. We have seen a slight reduction since our last reporting of 2% to our mean gender pay gap and an increase of 2% to our median gender pay gap.

We have a gender split of 46% male and 54% female across the firm overall however in all three of the lower quartiles we have a higher proportion of females. Our gender pay gap develops as careers progress, with our upper quartile being comprised of 63% males compared with 37% females.

At Azets, people in Partner roles are employees of the business and are included in our gender pay gap data. In many of our competitor businesses, Partners are not employees and their pay data is not therefore included in their statutory gender pay gap reporting although is sometimes reported in other publicly available information. Taking that information into account, Azets mean gender pay gap including Partners is often better than our competitors.

"Our global talent programme, Azets Reach, is delivering a range of important initiatives, supporting the advancement of career journeys for all our Azets colleagues. I am particularly proud of our promotion readiness programme which is identifying a number of colleagues ready for promotion within the next 2 years, 50% of whom are women."

Chris Horne, CEO

Our actions

Azets UK was formed in the UK in 2020 following the acquisition of a large number of different accountancy practices with legacy gender pay structures. Most of our gaps are driven by under-representation of females in senior roles within Azets. We recognise that we have further improvements to make, and this will remain a critical focus for us.

Over the past 12 months we have:

We have launched our 5 year Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) strategy which is designed to create tangible actions to increase diversity across the UK and wider Group.
We have launched a DE&I network group to improve inclusivity and give our colleagues opportunities to have a voice at an individual or collective level, and support Azets in delivering real change.
Through Azets Reach our global talent development programme, we have developed a robust and inclusive performance review process where more than 95% of our employees have had a formal career development conversation designed to improve future performance. This is an inclusive system to ensure every one of our colleagues gets the same experience and can build their career with Azets.
As part of the career development review process we have introduced promotion readiness linked to career aspirations and future roles. We have identified 26% of our population are ready for promotion within 2 years, half of whom are women. As well as formal training, we are now piloting a new Development Plan process to further support these colleagues into future roles.
We have now embedded a robust succession planning framework to identify key talent across the organisation which has identified people who are now being developed for senior roles in the future. The process is designed to support and enable career progression and ensure that we have a diverse pipeline of talent identified and prepared for senior roles.
In the last year we launched a new Leadership Development Programme called Journey to Advisory with 15 employees who have been identified as potential future leaders in the organisation, 54% of these were women, 2 of which have been promoted to Partner during the programme and 1 promoted to Director. The programme is designed to develop the skills, knowledge and behaviours required to be a leader at Azets.
We have developed as part of our onboarding programme a curriculum of training to educate our colleagues on Equality and Diversity and Unconscious Bias to address both culturally and regulatory aspects of inclusion, and encourage all genders to keep themselves abreast of important topics related to gender including how role-models and colleagues can work together, and which form part of our ongoing Managers Toolkit. The toolkit is regularly refreshed with new and important content.
As part of our new podcast series “Bang the Drum” we have focused on a number of topical areas in our industry but have created specific episodes on Diversity and Inclusion and the importance of Diversity of Cultures.
We have strengthened our approach to agile working to facilitate working patterns that work for our employees taking account of their other commitments.
We have formed a Menopause working group who have run awareness weeks, webinars, and workshops to support our colleagues in understanding more about the menopause and provide support to those who need it.

Looking ahead

We have introduced increased job placements to provide a further step for students to encourage them to choose a career in our profession.
We are piloting a new Individual Development Planning programme to support the development of our people into future roles.
We are launching a new Future Managers Programme to encourage our future leaders to take the development opportunities available to provide the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to take the steps into management and leadership.
We are continuing to develop our approach to career progression by actively approaching those high performers who we believe are promotion ready rather than waiting to see who will apply for roles.
We are developing our People system to enable us to obtain more diversity data to continually understand the makeup of our business from a diversity and social mobility perspective and help us understand if there are gaps where we need to take action to improve.
As we evolve our DE&I strategy we are building in specific action plans to ensure women have fair opportunities in our organisation and that we balance the diversity of our roles.
We have launched a new DE&I and Wellbeing calendar of events to put specific focus on key events throughout the year.
As part of our talent development strategy we have implemented new career development reviews with a 98% take up across our business which supports career progression, future development and promotion readiness.
We are also developing our compelling employer value proposition aimed at promoting our inclusive workforce initiatives which include broadening the partners we work with externally as well as appointing a Talent Acquisition Marketing Manager to help us drive these initiatives forward.

I confirm the data reported is accurate and has been calculated according to the legal requirements.

William Payne,

Board Director