Putting the foundations of good work in place ensures fairness, mitigates legal and reputational risk and grounds an inclusive company culture ready to scale.
Start with the basics
Wherever you are in your growth journey, make sure you’re doing the basics.
To start, check if you are doing the following:
- Fair pay: are you paying at least London Living Wage for all positions, including interns? Is your compensation structure equitable?
- Legal and ethical work: are your employment contracts fit for purpose and in line with changing legislation? Are you complying with the Equality Act 2010? Oury Clark has a handy set of mini-guides on key topics.
- Access to Human resources (HR): do your employees have access to internal or external HR? Having an HR information system is crucial for keeping your records accurate and compliant. Platforms like Personio or BambooHR are aimed at tech businesses. OpenOrg has a great library of resources specifically aimed at startups and scaleups.
London Living Wage
The London Living Wage is an independently calculated, voluntary hourly rate based on the cost of living. It is set at £13.85.
The Mayor of London has made a key commitment to expand the number of businesses accrediting as Living Wage employers, which is a great way to boost your employer brand and demonstrate your commitment to creating good work.
The Good Work Standard
The Good Work Standard is a free accreditation programme that provides employers with best practices, with information and resources to help you achieve them. Most Good Work Standard companies are larger businesses, but for those able to meet the commitments required, accreditation provides valuable recognition as one of London’s leading employers.
Other forms of accreditation such as with B-Corp or Great place to Work can also help to demonstrate your commitment to good work and attract candidates to your company.
What data should you measure?
Even in an earlier stage company, it’s important to track key data about your team and the candidates who apply to your roles. As you grow headcount, you will want to be more strategic. If (or when!) you reach 250 people, you are legally required to report annually on your gender pay gap.
For a scaleup beginning this process, ACAS has useful templates covering how to record and monitor age, disability, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender and sexual orientation.
The Greater London Authority (GLA) has also produced a comprehensive guide to equality data monitoring with a specific document for SMEs [PDF 127 KB] that you may find useful.
A good applicant tracking system (ATS) makes this process significantly easier and ensures compliance with data protection legislation. This can be as part of your HR system or as a standalone product, which tend to be more feature-rich.
Make sure to track through the process. This allows you to better understand how the composition of your funnel changes as you progress candidates through application, interviews and offers.
Across tech, there is an increasing focus on improving representation of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, who remain significantly underrepresented in the sector. Many companies now include socio-economic background to the characteristics measured in diversity stats.
The Sutton Trust has useful guidance and templates [PDF 1.54 MB] on how you can do this. Its Tech Future Taskforce, backed by the likes of Google, has lots of helpful employer resources on how to promote social mobility in your business.
Read our guide on data-driven recruitment.
Legal and ethical considerations of data
The collection and processing of personal data carries important legal and ethical responsibilities and must strictly comply with the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. All data on sensitive characteristics must be kept separate from application forms and CVs to eliminate any potential for discrimination.
Scaleups must communicate clearly about the purpose of data collection (for aggregate monitoring and policy improvement, not individual discrimination) and establish a strong ethical framework to use diversity data effectively.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provides comprehensive guidance on these regulations. You can streamline by using a compliant ATS, such as Ashby, HiBob or Team Tailor, that ensures your data collection is robust and compliant with legislation.
If in doubt, seek specialist legal advice to ensure you are compliant with all relevant legislation.
Next step
London has an amazing talent pool spread across its 33 boroughs. In the next step of this guide, we give you some unexpected places to look for your winning team.