National Inclusion Week 2022: Flash Pack talks pay transparency
Flash Pack was founded in 2014 and is a leading adventure-travel company for people in their 30s and 40s. What was the inspiration behind the company?
I’ve always been adventurous but by the time I was in my 30s, and single, I realised I was running short on options for people to travel with. All my friends were getting married, having kids or busy with their own respective careers and I wasn’t on that journey with them yet.
Researching options for group travel, I realised that the market at that time catered predominantly to young budget backpackers or the luxury retired market. There was nothing for people like me — travellers in their 30s and 40s looking for unique, experiential adventures around the world with a boutique edge.
Soon after, I met Lee for the first time, Flash Pack’s co-founder (and now my husband), after matching on a dating site. A few glasses of wine in, I mooted the idea for a group travel company for people in their 30s and 40s. Lee was a photojournalist at the time and his job involved a lot of international travel, so he shared my appetite for adventure and the Great Unknown. He immediately spotted the potential of Flash Pack as a concept, and the first few months of our relationship were spent attending trade shows and brainstorming product ideas before the company launched a year later.
It’s National Inclusion Week and it was also International Equal Pay Day recently. Earlier this year, we announced a pay transparency pilot and working group to level up job opportunities across the UK. What are you doing at Flash Pack to ensure that your employees are paid fairly?
After relaunching Flash Pack in November 2021, we were committed to ensuring we were building a company culture based around trust, honesty and openness. We wanted our employees to feel heard and valued in a post-pandemic market.
An audit of how we retained our talent revealed our pay decisions were being made inconsistently, slowing our ability to scale the team. What’s more, keeping salary levels a secret created mistrust among colleagues, with confusion over job roles labelled as having “competitive” pay.
Flexibility, training and a generous pension scheme are all important aspects of our benefits system, but we realised our lack of pay transparency was holding us back, as well as aggravating existing gender and ethnicity pay gaps.
To bring about change, we created an industry-first compensation calculator that benchmarks all Flash Pack roles and levels against a large body of salary data canvassed from 3000 similar startups (the travel industry is significantly underpaid, hence we chose startups to measure by).
In addition, all Flash Pack vacancies now have public salary bands and option grants so potential candidates can see not only how much they would earn, but also the options granted for that position. We also introduced levelling conversations with all existing team members to make sure everyone knows why they’re on their current level of pay, and so we have a view of everyone’s career ambitions and the steps we can take to support their professional and personal growth.
Has advertising salaries on job adverts had a positive impact on your business? How does pay transparency benefit Flash Pack and its employees?
The process of levelling and benchmarking salaries has been extensive — and it’s worth noting that it’s still evolving. Demystifying career progression and compensation is the kind of overriding goal that is never truly “done”. We will continue to scrutinise our pay practices to ensure we are being as fair and transparent as possible, and that we are held accountable to our decisions.
While undertaking a goal like this requires work and a lot of honest self-assessment, the results are huge. We’ve managed to cultivate an incredible level of trust in our team. A salary is about acknowledging the impact that our employees have and the responsibilities they agree to, not whether or not they can persuade their way to better pay. That’s an extra hoop that candidates and employees alike shouldn’t have to jump through, and it’s the core of all kinds of (hidden) injustices.
Flash Pack staff can now be reassured by the fact that they are being assessed and compensated fairly against their colleagues and the wider industry. It has enabled us to eliminate the mistrust and suspicion that arises when compensation, promotion and reward for good work is done behind closed doors. We’ve also seen an increase in candidates from a diverse range of backgrounds who want to work for Flash Pack as a result of the policy.
Do you have any tips for businesses looking to improve their approach to pay transparency? Where should they start?
The best place to start is by taking a hyper-critical look internally at what you’re already doing and where you might be falling short in terms of fair compensation. This will help you see how pay decisions are being made and identify any inconsistencies.
With inconsistencies come unhappy employees, so it’s important that you involve your staff in this process to retain that core sense of trust. Your employees need to be clear on how you plan to resolve any issues. This typically involves creating a performance and progression framework (we made ours with the support of an organisation called Justly), detailing the skills employees need at each available salary level, and what exactly is required to move up to the next level of pay.
Last but not least, only 1 in 3 UK entrepreneurs is a woman and the Government has ambitions to change that. As a female co-founder and CEO, what do you think we need to do to support women to launch businesses? Do you have any advice for women looking to start that journey?
Less than 17% of all active companies in the UK are led by women, and they attract fewer than 12% of the 1.3m investments made annually in UK businesses. This compares to the 61% of active companies led by men, who receive the lion’s share of investment. So, we have a huge amount of work to do in removing these barriers and achieving greater gender parity, especially at C-Suite level.
My advice for female CEOs getting started? If you are passionate about your idea and believe it can be successful, then you need to grab the opportunity with both hands and prove everybody else wrong.
Grow your network with other entrepreneurs and learn from them; their mistakes, their successes and the different obstacles they have had to overcome. This support and sense of community can make a massive difference in getting that golden business idea off the ground.
What is the Government doing to support women’s economic empowerment?
- Launching a pay transparency pilot and working group to close salary gaps.
- Announcing a new ‘returners’ programme to support women into STEM roles after taking time out to care for loved ones, adding to 25 previous returner programmes across the private and public sector.
- Setting an ambition to increase the number of female entrepreneurs by half by 2030 in response to the 2019 Rose Review, and launching a Taskforce to support them.
- Making the Help to Grow scheme and start-up loans available to eligible UK business owners and entrepreneurs.
