Following the disestablishment of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit in June 2009, the Department of Labour will continue to provide to both public and private sector organisations the pay and employment equity resources developed by the Unit.

Government policy supports continuing implementation of pay and employment equity response plans, excluding pay investigations of female-dominated occupations and recognises the obligations of public sector chief executives to ensure they continue to address and respond to any identified gender inequities as part of good management practice and being a good employer. Government encourages voluntary participation of public and private sector organisations in pay and employment equity projects.

Pay and Employment Equity Toolkit

The pay and employment equity section of Department of Labour’s website provides a brief introduction to the PaEE resources which include:

• Tools and templates for carrying out the pay and employment equity review, including an automated data analysis tool, an education and training programme, a report template, a guide for project managers, a communications guide and case studies of completed reviews.
• Guides to meeting the Gender-inclusive Job Evaluation Standard, and a case study
• Spotlight: A Skills Recognition Tool, consisting of an introduction, and guides for writing job descriptions, performance management, recruitment and selection, and a background research report.
• Three overview papers setting out the results of the completed public sector pay and employment equity reviews, examining the model and operation of the review process, and describing the equitable job evaluation project.
• The Equitable Job Evaluation System, consisting of a factor plan, user guide, questionnaire and education and training programme. Users need to read and agree to the conditions of use under which the tool is made available.

While the tools and resources will be made available, the Department cannot allocate resources to the ongoing support of them. Users may need to engage their own technical assistance to get the most out of the tools.

The Pay and Employment Equity Toolkit can be ordered online and will be delivered on CD ROM. The Equitable Job Evaluation System resources, which require users to agree to terms and conditions on the order form, will be emailed.

New release – Spotlight: A Skills Recognition Tool

Spotlight is a skills recognition framework designed to help managers identify and measure three hard to classify sets of people skills. It helps describe individual and teamwork skills that have for various reasons remained tacit — the skills used in combining work with people, data and things, or in coordinating the use of technical and social skills within the time-frames of a work process.

Spotlight can help you ensure that valuable people skills, organisational and risk management skills are recognised and rewarded in your organisation. It is a simple and flexible add-on, easy to build into any existing HR approach.

The Spotlight tool consists of a skills framework and a set of four user guides for applying this framework in:
1. writing position descriptions
2. selecting staff
3. managing performance
4. fostering individual and career development.

It gives a new precision to concepts such as ‘problem-solving’, ‘communication skills’ and ‘time management’, providing a systematic way of naming different levels of the skills that are the basis of effective work performance.

Spotlight is available free of charge from the Department of Labour as part of the Pay and Employment Equity Toolkit. Order it here.