Develop an action plan

• Get support within your organisation: Your action plan will be more successful if everyone in your organisation is fully committed to the plan and its goals. Seek the endorsement from your senior leaders to undertake this work. You might also want to establish a working group made up of senior leaders, HR, union representatives, employee networks, and other interested employees to help with the action plan development and its implementation. 
• Understand your gender pay gap: It is helpful to have a good understanding of your organisation’s gender pay gap, its drivers, and how it compares to other organisations in your industry who might also report on their gender pay gap.
• Find other examples: See if other organisations in your industry have published their gender pay gap action plans, as this might give you some ideas on what to do with your plan. You could also look at the public sector, as the Public Service Commission links to all current annual gender pay action plans on their website.
• Format: Decide if your action plan is stand-alone document, part of a larger policy, or a statement from leadership about your organisation’s commitment.

Once you’re ready to get started on your gender pay gap action plan, complete the self-assessment questionnaire in the online gender pay gap tool.

The questions will help you assess where you are currently in your organisation’s gender pay gap journey. Your answers will help produce a personalised report that you can download with some recommended advice and actions.

You’ll also get a copy of the Gender Pay Gap Action Plan template to use to develop your action plan.

A context statement provides clear background information about your organisation’s gender pay gap, such as the gender pay gap figures you’ve calculated, the time period that the gender pay gap data was taken from, the calculation method used, and the drivers. 

A commitment statement reflects your organisation’s desire to reduce the gender pay gap and improve gender equality. It is helpful to reflect some of the key work you have previously undertaken that you think has made a substantial difference to your gender pay gap.

These statements are important as they can give your stakeholders (employees, Board members, shareholders, unions, and/or customers) an understanding of your approach to tackling the gender pay gap.

Read the guidance material on developing both statements and find examples.

Include all of the relevant data and analysis you’ve done to calculate and understand your organisation’s gender pay gap, including the overall gender pay gap percentages, staff numbers, and median total pay broken down by gender – men, women, and gender diverse.

You must ensure that any data you include (or eventually publish) is private. You must not include any personal employee information (such as their name) or present the data in a way that could identify employees. We recommend that only organisations with 10 or more employees in each gender cohort report on their gender pay gap publicly.

More information on data privacy can be found at data.govt.nz.

Your goals should be the overall outcomes you want to achieve. They should be broad, measurable, consistent with your organisation’s wider priorities, and focus on the key drivers of your organisation’s gender pay gap.

Some examples of goals could be:

• “Increase the number of women in senior leadership roles by 30%.”
• “Reduce the organisation-wide gender pay gap by 5% by 2027.”
• “All employees have equal access to merit-based bonuses.”

An action is a specific step or measure that you will take to achieve the objectives that you set. Actions are more granular and operational. They detail the “how” and “when” of the plan. They are practical and can be measured or tracked.

Identify the areas where you want to drive change in to meet your goals and help close your organisation’s gender pay gap.

These areas will vary depending on your organisation, but may include:

• recruitment
• career progression and promotion
• breaks and leave
• components of pay
• leadership or management.

We recommend choosing one or two actions under each area. The actions need to be simple to understand, targeted, and time bound with a clear output that can be measured.

Some example actions could include:

• Create and implement flexible work policies that are available to all employees in the next 18 months.
• Review all current promotion and progression criteria and develop clear, standardised criteria for promotion to leadership roles to eliminate ambiguity and discretion in the next six months.

If you are unsure of where to start with developing your actions, take the self-assessment questionnaire to see where you sit on your gender pay gap journey and get some recommended actions your organisation could take.

As you develop the actions, check back in with your key stakeholders to get feedback and advice.

Setting clear timelines and milestones will help you make progress towards your goals and work through your actions. More ambitious actions may need to be broken down into milestones to make them achievable.

Spread out the milestones over the course of the action plan. Spread out the milestones over the course of the action plan, as it can take more than 2-3 years to see tangible and sustained results.

Specify who will be responsible for measuring progress against the milestones, how progress will be measured, and how the results will be recorded and shared both internally and publicly.

Your action plan should include processes for monitoring your gender pay gap and for measuring and evaluating the impact of actions you have taken against your plan’s goals.

Make sure the person responsible for monitoring and evaluating each action has enough time set aside within their work hours to complete this.

As well as tracking actions you should regularly monitor gender equity measures. These could include your gender pay gap, representation of women at different levels within the organisation, proportion of women and men receiving bonuses and other measures that you identified as being important to your organisation.

You should also decide the point in the future when you might review and develop an updated action plan, such as every two years, to share your progress and make new goals and actions to continue the work.

Once you have these steps, your action plan should be ready to be endorsed and approved by your organisation’s leadership team, as well as all of your key stakeholders.

Now you’re ready to publish! Make your action plan easily available to staff either by email or on your intranet, and publish it on your website to make it public.

Now you’re ready to start implementing these actions to work to close your organisation’s gender pay gap! 

Find out more about reporting on your gender pay gap.