Gender Pay Gap Report April 2022

Bonus Recipients

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 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