ARUP
Arup’s HR team found that, with a growing global workforce, they were faced with an increasingly complex rewards management challenge. This including ensuring that their reward practices are fair and equitable across the company. Arup already had access to the internal and external data necessary to achieve these objectives however the prospect of manually modelling salary ranges was not an attractive option. For this reason NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions was invited to deliver Pay Modeller to Arup.
The company
Arup is a global firm of designers, engineers, planners and business consultants providing a diverse range of professional services to clients around the world. The company exerts a significant influence on the built environment and is the creative force behind many of the world’s most innovative and sustainable designs. The firm has almost 9,000 staff working in over 80 offices in almost 40 countries.
The situation
Arup’s HR team found that, with a growing workforce across an expanding global office network, they were faced with an increasingly complex rewards management challenge. This including meeting their commitment to ensuring that reward practices are fair and equitable across the company.
Although the company has a total reward philosophy that includes the quality of career opportunities as well as remuneration and benefits, pay is of course especially important. As well as achieving fairness in terms of pay, there is also a need to develop more formalised salary ranges to help managers complete salary reviews for existing staff and set salaries for new joiners.
Arup already had access to the internal and external data necessary to achieve these objectives. However, the prospect of manually modelling salary ranges was not attractive given the time this would take. That’s why NorthgateArinso Reward Solutions was invited to deliver Pay Modeller to Arup.
The solution
It’s still early days in the company’s use of the system, and so the full potential of Pay Modeller has not yet been realised. Nevertheless, it has already helped Arup successfully meet a pressing need.
Two Arup offices in the Gulf had for several years employed just a couple of people, but recent growth in the region meant that suddenly many more people were working there. Most of the employees were moved from other countries and so were working on a variety of expatriate terms and conditions.
“It was agreed that the ex-pats should all move to a local currency reward package to support continuing growth in the region,” says Arup’s Rachel Hobcroft. “We started to do this by collating market data for the sector in the region based on our global grading structure. Then we used Pay Modeller to develop a new local currency grading structure for our operations in the Gulf that could accommodate the variety of existing terms and conditions.”
One of the best things about Pay Modeller was the way it enabled Rachel and her colleagues to share information across the company: “We needed to get information validated by managers at various stages in the project. Pay Modeller allowed us to present the information in a very user-friendly way, with graphs and other visuals taking the place of complex spreadsheets.
“This especially made it easy for everyone to see the impact that changes in the model created and make decisions accordingly. For us in HR, a graph is much more intuitive and easier to explain than a spreadsheet, which saves time for both us and for managers involved in the process.”
With a new salary structure established for the Gulf, Arup are now moving on to do the same for the rest of the business, starting with the UK, the USA and Australia.
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