Fair and rewarding pay at St. Margaret’s Hospice Care

The challenge

St. Margaret’s Hospice delivers high quality compassionate care to patients and their families. Verditer supported St. Margaret’s to develop and implement pay principles that are agile, sustainable and fair.

Existing reward frameworks were complex and rigid. Making it difficult for the organisation to respond to attraction and retention challenges in highly competitive talent markets.

“Our aim was to develop clear pay principles, simplify our approach so that we can pay our people fairly and reward them for their impact.”

Our approach

Verditer supported the development of a reward strategy that aligned with St. Margaret’s values.

“The strategy gave us clarity on how we want to reward our people and gave us the basis for developing an approach to reward that suits us now and for the future.”

Implementation was in three stages: development of a Job Classification framework, external pay benchmarking and the creation of clear pay structures and principles.

“Simplifying the grading system has meant that we’ve been able to share it more freely. It’s particular to us which means it works for all areas; clinical, retail, fundraising and professional services and we can see how all of our roles work together.”

The outcome

Pay benchmarking was done at the same time as the NHS was renegotiating terms. As an important talent market, it was crucial to include all intelligence in the exercise to ensure the optimal basis for competitive pay structures.

“Verditer’s pay benchmarking knowledge allowed us to scrutinise the different sectors we work in. The robustness of their approach gave the executives confidence in the process and their decisions.”

The pay structure enabled St. Margaret’s to demonstrate commitment to their people through the Real Living Wage, providing agility to respond to external market pressures and enabling them to reward employees as contribution grows.

“We’re very proud of what we achieved in such ambitious timescales. We really feel that we delivered on our goals.”

Services used

“Julia’s attendance at our executive meetings was really valuable. She helped position everything in a way that resonated with the senior team and demonstrated the professionalism with which we were approaching the project.”

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