Transforming pay at St Andrew’s Healthcare

The challenge

St Andrew’s is the UK’s leading mental healthcare charity.  It provides specialist care for people with challenging mental health needs, with 4,500 employees across its Northampton, Birmingham, Essex and Nottinghamshire hospitals.

Verditer partnered with St Andrew’s Healthcare to transform pay into a progressive approach fit for the future.

Alongside significant business transformation, changes were needed to the existing pay system that had proven to be costly and inflexible.

Our approach

Through this project, the ‘entitlement’ pay structure, driven by detailed job evaluation and NHS rates, has been replaced with broad, transparent career levels, and flexible pay ranges.

“We needed a partner that would work through the complexity and create something that was right for us, rather than being ‘shoehorned’ into an existing product.”

Verditer supported the articulation of the business case for the new pay strategy.  The executive team needed convincing the enormous change proposed was right for the business.

The agreed strategy and plan of action were communicated through a leadership conference and via team meetings.

“Verditer’s training for our HR Business Partners was invaluable.  Through a better understanding of reward, and the rationale behind our new approach, all of HR have championed the change in an informed way.”

Employees were involved in the design of a straightforward classification framework aligned to the new competencies, replacing 12 existing grades with five clear career levels,

“Our new job classification is just so intuitive. It makes as much sense when I show it to a Psychiatrist as it does our Head of IT.”

The outcome

Robust market data from across the healthcare sector was then used to develop broad pay ranges for each level and job family, with spot rates for more structured career paths.

The framework provides a competitive range of pay, leaving line managers the flexibility to make holistic pay decisions for individuals using factors such as performance and potential.

The new approach is affordable, has the agility to respond to the changing complexities of the business, and reflects differing employee contribution in a fair and trusted way.