While the new EU Pay Transparency Directive is a step in the right direction for gender equality in the workplace, global employee pay company, CloudPay, has warned that more than remuneration needs to be tracked if an accurate picture is to be defined.

Under the directive – which achieved a majority vote from the EU Parliament – companies will be required to implement new tactics in order to battle the gender pay gap, including annual reporting on gender pay for firms with more than 250 employees and a three-year review for those with more than 100 staff. The regulations also enable employees to request information related to their salary and the average pay of those who do the same or similar work, broken down by gender.

This reporting needs to provide complete transparency around all benefits related to employment contracts in order to provide more informative data for employers and employees alike.

John Pearce, SVP of Global Payroll Operations at CloudPay, explained: “While we absolutely welcome any steps to create an equal remuneration landscape for all, the modern world of work means that the entire benefits package available for workers isn’t always visible. This means that many financial perks outside of annual pay aren’t being tracked.

Beyond bonus schemes, which certainly need to be reported on if full transparency is to be achieved, flexibility around pay and tailored remuneration packages is also becoming the norm. For some that may mean access to childcare vouchers in lieu of a pay rise or additional holidays.

“If true pay equality is to be achieved, all benefits being utilised by individuals need to be tracked. However, this isn’t always easily achievable, particularly with outdated tech stacks which aren’t necessarily streamlined or don’t provide clear visibility on a global scale of the pay and benefits being accessed by staff. While we’ve seen a growing focus on improving pay technology as the world of work changed post-Covid, this latest news is yet another clear incentive to invest in better pay technology before the directive is transposed into national law in the next three years.”