Introduction + Client Overview

The business is a membership and charitable organisation. They are a London-based charity with a headcount of 20 employees. They have a variety of roles within their business, from Administrative Assistants to CEO level.

We supported the charity on a one-off salary benchmarking project to ensure salaries within their business were competitive, fair, and in line with the relevant bands, thereby ensuring progression and retention of employees.

Salary benchmarking is an extremely useful tool in attracting top talent, allowing you to be an employer of choice for prospective candidates, and retaining your existing talent by preventing them from seeking higher salaries elsewhere. It enables you to ensure pay equity and fairness by identifying internal disparities from a gender, racial or other bias-related gaps. By conducting salary benchmarking using external data, it can enhance your reputation for fairness and professionalism for your existing employees.  

The business had completed a salary benchmarking project back in 2022 and was seeking an updated report to ensure their existing salaries were still competitive, given the rise in the cost of living. Their current method of benchmarking roles, due to the nature of their industry, was to group roles based on job title and experience level rather than specific skill sets and departments. This resulted in some roles being slightly inflated and not giving an accurate reflection of their rate of pay and some roles being grouped with non-similar roles (banding method).

For example, the Executive Assistant (EA) role sat within the banding for the Administrative Assistant roles. Due to the variation in roles and responsibilities, the benchmarking process inflated the salary band, resulting in a misrepresentation of appropriate salaries for this level within the business. It was proposed that the EA role have a stand-alone band to ensure the data was as accurate as possible.

The usual approach to benchmarking would be to divide all roles within the business in the following format:

• Job title

• Department

• Level within the department

• Location

• Industry sector

• Company size

By benchmarking using the above methods, you can get an accurate representation of where your business’ salaries sit compared to competitors.

Due to operating within the charitable sector, the banding method of benchmarking enables this business to manage its finances responsibly and maintain public trust. We adapted our usual benchmarking method to support their business needs; however, it was recommended that moving forward, the roles should be split into separate departments, delving into the relevant skill sets needed to carry out each role.

Approach

We began by benchmarking all the roles within the business against relevant data sources within other membership and charitable organisations to compare salaries for 2025. Each role had 3-4 roles benchmarked and minimum and maximum averages were created so the business could see where their current salaries fit within those of the new bands.

A percentage was then calculated so the client could visually see which roles they were paying the current average salary for and which roles were below or above the current rate of pay. This would then enable us to provide guidance on the next steps to align everyone with the current industry average rate of pay.

Results + Outcomes

The benchmarking allowed the charity to see where their current roles compared against similar roles within the same sector / industry. They were given a clear understanding of which roles they were paying below the average and where salary increases may need to be awarded to retain individuals and remain competitive. It also allowed them to manage expectations for any roles that sat above the market rate in terms of future pay increases.

Within the report we delivered, we gave advice to the client as to what the next steps should be for them to continue to offer fair and appropriate compensation to their employees:

• Define clear salary bands and advertise these on new roles for recruitment purposes

• Consider evaluating roles according to skillset required and department

• Build a renumeration policy / Pay + Reward Policy