PRISMByEconPactRequest assessment
05Process

Three stages, and the first one costs nothing.

There is no new infrastructure to procure. The workforce data required is data you already hold.

Contents

  1. 001Readiness assessment
  2. 002Baseline measurement
  3. 003Ongoing measurement
  4. 004How pricing works
  5. 005Questions

001

Readiness assessment

( Two weeks, at no cost )

001Stage one

Before any survey is written or any employee is contacted, we look at the workforce data you already hold and tell you what it can and cannot currently show.

What you send.A pseudonymised extract covering job level, tenure, compensation band, performance rating and function. No names, and no survey.

What you get back.A short written assessment covering what your data would support, where the gaps in it are, which parts of the workforce are large enough to analyse credibly, sector context for organisations of your shape, and a recommendation on whether measurement is worth doing at all.

Sometimes that recommendation is no. If your population cannot support findings you could act on, we would rather say so at this stage than take a fee for a report that will not survive scrutiny in your own boardroom.

002

Baseline measurement

( Eight to ten weeks )

002Stage two

The first full measurement, establishing where the organisation actually stands.

Weeks 1 to 2Alignment.Data protection assessment completed and signed off with your data protection officer. Workforce data transferred to template and validated. Identifier matching agreed. Nothing is deployed until this is done.
Weeks 3 to 4Fieldwork.The eight minute survey goes out, using communications templates we provide and your sponsor sends. Two week response window, with reminders. An employee question and answer session is available if you want one.
Weeks 5 to 7Analysis.Index computed, modules run, non-response assessed, findings tested and benchmarked against population data.
Weeks 8 to 10Reporting.Executive report, board ready material, a facilitated leadership session, and a prioritised roadmap.

On population size

Findings are only as good as the numbers behind them. A very small population can support an organisation level answer but not a credible breakdown by function, and we will scope that out in writing rather than deliver noise with a decimal point on it. Where the numbers do support it, function level mapping is included.

What arrives at the end

Organisational equity score, with a confidence interval
Background premium, reported between quartiles and in pounds
Function level mapping, wherever group sizes support it
Gap closure budget, with bounds and a phasing recommendation
Risk and opportunity summary
Executive presentation and a facilitated leadership session
Governance and methodology appendix
Completed data protection impact assessment
Non-response analysis

The last two are formal deliverables rather than annexes, because in this category they are part of the product.

What we need from you

A data extract

Workforce records to a template we provide, pseudonymised before it reaches us.

A sponsor

One named person who can make decisions and whose name goes on the survey invitation. Response rates depend on this more than on anything we do.

Internal communications

Sent by you, using templates from us.

Access to leadership

For the reporting session at the end. A finding nobody senior hears is not worth producing.

003

Ongoing measurement

( Annual cycle )

003Stage three

Structural advantage does not disappear after one measurement. It shifts slowly, compounds quietly, and reverses if attention moves elsewhere. A single reading tells you where you are. A series tells you whether anything you did worked.

Annual re-measurement covers year on year movement, updated exposure modelling, return on whatever you invested in between, and a leadership review. For organisations reporting to investors, regulators or a board committee, this is the layer that turns a one off finding into a defensible track record.

004

How pricing works

( Investment )

004Scoped rather
than listed

The readiness assessment is free. Everything after it is priced against the shape of the work.

We do not publish a rate card, because a number without a scope attached is meaningless in this category. What an engagement costs depends on how many employees are in scope, how many parts of the business you want reported separately, which of the four modules you need, whether recruitment and progression history are included alongside pay, and whether you want a single baseline or an ongoing annual cycle.

An organisation measuring one business unit on pay alone is a materially different piece of work from one measuring a whole firm across hiring, progression and programme return. Pricing both the same way would mean overcharging the first.

How to get a number

Tell us roughly how many people are in scope and what you are trying to find out. We will come back with a scoped proposal and a fixed fee, normally within a week. There is no charge for that conversation and no obligation attached to it.

Request a scoped price→

005

Questions we are always asked

( Objections )

005Answered
plainly
Is this discriminatory?
We score only socio-economic background, which is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Sex, ethnicity and disability are reported as separate cross-cuts, exactly as in the equality monitoring you already run. The measures we score are the Social Mobility Commission's own recommended standard, which is to say the government's.
Will our general counsel clear this?
Bring them in at the first meeting rather than the third. The full impact assessment and Article 9 analysis are on the governance page of this site. If your data protection officer wants to speak to ours before anything else happens, that is the normal order of events here. The engagement can also be commissioned by your counsel if you prefer.
Does this create evidence against us?
It creates a measurement you currently do not have. That is why the option to commission through counsel exists, and why many clients use it. The alternative is worth weighing as well: discovering a gap in public, on a statutory deadline, with no baseline and no plan, is a materially worse position than knowing early and having a costed roadmap.
Will our employees actually answer these questions?
The Civil Service collects these same questions from hundreds of thousands of staff. Response rates hold up because the questions are about parents and schooling rather than about the person themselves, and because there is a decline option on every one of them. Declining is treated as missing data rather than filled in with an average, so it carries no penalty and no advantage.
We already report our gender pay gap. Why is this different?
A gender pay gap figure is the difference between two averages. It tells you that a gap exists, not what produced it. Background is a structural variable that predicts pay and progression more strongly than gender or ethnicity, operates almost entirely outside credentials, and appears nowhere in any report you currently produce.
Could we do this ourselves?
You can collect the data, since the questions are public. What is harder to build internally is the estimation, the benchmarking against a population of more than 190,000 observations, and the independence that makes a finding credible to a board or a regulator. An internal report concluding that the pay structure is fine tends not to persuade anyone.
What if the findings are bad?
Then you have them on your own timetable, before anyone else does, with an estimate of what closing the gap would cost and a sequence for doing it. That is the point of measuring.
How long before we see anything useful?
The readiness assessment takes about two weeks and requires nothing from your employees. A full baseline runs eight to ten weeks end to end.