Salary survey
According to the Discrimination Act, the university must conduct an annual salary survey. Here you can find out more about the purpose and what you as a manager can do.
Content of this page:
- Basis for salary review
- Equal and equivalent work
- The BESTA classification system
- Unjustified salarydifferences
- Action plan for equal salary
All employers are required by law to carry out an annual salary survey to ensure that wages in the workplace are equal.
The purpose of the salary survey is to identify, remedy and prevent unjustified salary differences between women and men.
All employees, regardless of their form of employment and position in the organisation, are included in the survey. This means that both permanent and fixed-term contracts are included in the pay survey.
The university-wide survey and analysis work is carried out by the HR Division in collaboration with the trade unions in a joint salary survey group. The operations' HR functions contact the managers in cases where they need to be involved in the salary survey.
Basis for salary review
Managers are responsible for ensuring that salaries are fair for their employees. The salary survey is a good basis for the annual salary review.
The salary survey and analysis should cover
- rules and practices on pay and other employment conditions,
- differences in pay between women and men who perform work that is considered equal or equivalent,
- analysis of any differences that are directly or indirectly related to gender.
Equal and equivalent work
A job is equal to another job if it has the same or almost the same tasks.
A job is equivalent to another job if the overall requirements are equivalent. The assessment of the requirements should be based on the criteria of knowledge and skills, responsibility, effort and working conditions.
The BESTA classification system
In order to enable the analysis of equal or equivalent work, the BESTA classification system is used. The system aims to map the different types of work tasks that occur at the authority and the salaries for these tasks. BESTA thus maps the actual tasks of employees regardless of their job title.
It is important that the BESTA coding for individual employees is kept up to date – especially in connection with new recruitment, changed employment or changed degree of responsibility and complexity within existing employment – to facilitate the analysis work in the salary survey work.
Managers are supported by local HR functions to classify correctly.
Unjustified salary differences
Salary differentials can be both justified and unjustified. An unjustified salary gap has no rational explanation. A difference based on gender, for example, is unjustified. A factual salary difference may be due to differences in the difficulty and responsibility of the work, the individual's experience and education, and the results of the work effort.
The university shall work for a gender-neutral salary setting and to equalise the gender-based salary differences within the organisation. If there is a suspicion that inappropriate salary differences exist, it is the employer who must show that this is not the case.
Representatives from the employer and trade union organisations must carefully compare the calculated outcome for women and men during the salary review process. If the comparison is to the disadvantage of any category, the proposals for new salary must be further analysed and corrected if the salary difference is inappropriate.
Action plan for equal salary
Once the salary survey has been analysed, a joint action plan for equal salary is drawn up. It must contain the results of the survey and analysis, the wage adjustments and other measures needed, and a timetable and cost estimate for the measures.
If there are salary differences between women and men with the same or equivalent work, these must be explained by objective reasons. Any measures must be implemented as soon as possible, but no later than within three years.
Both the action plan and other documentation of the salary survey are public documents. The university must strike a careful balance between consideration for the employee's integrity and the Equality Act's requirements for reporting and justification.