SkyCity: Leading the Way in Pay Transparency and Equity

SkyCity is committed to equity and first published its gender pay gap in 2019 in its annual report. Then, a couple of years later, they published their ethnic pay gap. At the time they didn’t know how they compared to other organisations of a similar size, but they knew it was the next right step towards closing pay gaps.    

We talked with Fleur Allison, General Manager, Performance and Reward for the SkyCity Entertainment Group 

You are leaders in publishing and closing your gender pay gap. How did it start ? 
We have had the benefit at Sky City of having a leadership that has been focused on this, going back five or six years. That was our starting point. 

I have always said that if we’re going to build these frameworks into the way we do things, let’s be transparent about it. Before we published, we made sure we were educating our staff internally; ‘what is a pay gap’ and ‘does that mean I am paid 9% less than a man doing the same job’ etc.  

No pay gap is great, but we were one of the first to publish ours so we didn’t know if it was terrible at the time. We had figures from Statistics NZ, which showed we were better than the overall stat, but we did not know how we compared to other similar-sized organisations. It was a process; our Chief Executive was keen to publish so with his support we convinced the rest of the executive team and the Board.  

What changes did you make as a result of publishing? 
If you look across our population, we have more men in higher-paying jobs so that meant we had to focus on our talent pipelines, and making sure all our processes were fair and just and right. 

There are a lot of views about pay gap calculation around what’s measured – average vs median etc. We have a pay gap and that’s not OK but just because ours might not be as bad as others we had to have strategies to shrink it. We also wanted to make sure we were not masking problems. Understanding the data and the best measures for us and our employee population was important.  

Any other lessons learned along the way? 
Over the Covid period, there was the real tension of needing to keep the lights on. We made tough decisions that any wage or salary increases we could afford to give would be given to our lowest-paid workers. We had very limited resources in terms of budgets and increases and we knew the right thing to do was to focus on ensuring our employees could have sustainable lives. 

That had a significant impact on our pay gaps because of the intersectionality around gender and ethnicity in terms of low-paid work and low-paid occupations. A pay gap is just a measure. We were trying to do the best for our employees, it never crossed my mind it would have that impact on the gender and ethnicity pay gaps - but it did. It was an unexpected Covid outcome. 

“This work is a marathon. That’s why getting a pay gap as a number signifies a point in time. A place to start. It’s important to calculate it, it’s important to be transparent about it, but there is also all the other work that happens across the business that impacts it.” 

Can you share any insights from your ethnic pay gap journey? 
At the time we were considering it, no other listed companies were publishing their ethnic pay gaps as many did not have data. We had good data around gender, but less so around ethnicity.    

We wanted to be transparent to our people about what we wanted to do and why. That’s key when it comes to publishing ethnic pay gaps, so we created a campaign asking employees to make sure their ethnicity was correct. We explained we were going to use it to calculate our pay gaps, look at development, and our employee resource groups. We made some structural changes – when you sign up for a role you must select an ethnicity (you also can say you don’t want to select or declare anything).   

As we had been transparent about what we would do with the data we were able to quickly move from having 60% of our employee's ethnicity captured in our HR Information System (HRIS) to over 85%.   

That got us to the point where we were comfortable enough that the data was robust, and we would be calculating the right things. We measure our pay gap from female ethnicity to pākehā male. Our ethnic pay gaps were higher than our gender pay gaps, and we needed to decide what changes we needed to make for our Pasifika, Māori and Asian women.   

The pay gap is a measure, so everything else we do is going to have an impact on that. We have to make sure we have diverse talent, and pipelines and look at our promotion processes. Plus look outside of our industry for who we might hire. You don’t need to work in a casino for 15 years to be good at working at SkyCity. We had to break down the industry occupational segregation as well.   

When we decided to publish our ethnic pay gaps, again, we didn’t have data from other organisations we could lean on. We could use figures from Statistics NZ as a benchmark but that was another leap of faith.    

Once published, did you get any backlash from staff?  
We‘ve had nothing but positive feedback from staff. That’s coming from our employee resource groups and the support we give across the board in terms of development, leadership and career. Even when the gap is visible it’s been talked about in a positive light because employees can see that we’re focused on improving what it’s like to work at SkyCity.   

We make sure we highlight career paths and stories for our employees. We have some amazing stories of career progression, people who started doing bussing work (cleaning glasses etc) or dealing tables and ended up in senior operational or management roles.   

These gaps are our own internal measures, and we have to hold ourselves against them, not what others are doing. It’s vital our organisation feels like a diverse and inclusive workplace. There is always more we can do but we are committed to working to change it. 

What's important to focus on next in the gender equity space ? 
Ethnicity pay gaps are important as part of a bigger piece. I would love to see Aotearoa New Zealand move with the rest of the world and get to a point where every organisation is publicly disclosing their gender and ethnic pay gaps. If we look at Australia, they have been reporting their gender pay gaps for about six or seven years, but only in the last couple of years publishing them. But there is nothing on their road map for ethnicity. We know that the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity is critical to understand and to measure.  

Part of a larger frontier around transparency is being clear about why an organisational framework gets built up, why people are paid what they’re paid and how talent decisions are made. That’s got to come next. We shouldn't be hiding any of this, as being secretive benefits some people and disadvantages others. Transparency is key. Organisations have a responsibility to continue to push the government around publicising pay gaps – ethnic and gender pay gaps.