Introduction to our Total Remuneration Package (TRP)

Introduction to our Total Remuneration Package (TRP)

Human Resources

Introduction Welcome to this introductory guide to our Total Remuneration Package (TRP), a new perspective on pay and benefits here at Imperial.

As you’ll learn throughout this guide, TRP includes your salary, pensions, annual leave, and other non-financial benefits, such as professional development, wellbeing support and employee discounts.

Our people are the most important part of Imperial and are at the centre of delivering our academic mission. Ensuring that you are rewarded appropriately and fairly is critical to maintaining our success, and crucial to this is the pay and benefits we provide to you.

More than half of our annual spend goes towards our people, with the remaining on the facilities, infrastructure and other support that is needed for them to do their research and teaching. In 2019/20 we spent £567m on people, encompassing all of the elements that make up TRP.

An Introduction to TRP There are two key factors that influence what we spend on our TRP: benchmarking against comparable institutions to ensure we’re competitive in the package we offer; and balancing our remuneration package against our other commitments and income to ensure we’re sustainable.

2021 is a very active year for TRP. As well as the USS valuation, we have a number of other TRP milestones coming up, including the SAUL pension scheme valuation, reporting on our ethnicity pay gap for the first time (alongside our gender pay gap), our first international pay benchmarking exercise and reviewing the salary structure for professional, technical and operational staff.

Most importantly, we want to provide you with the tools to better understand what you receive as a member of the College.

I hope that this guide provides an accessible introduction to the principles behind this transition, and what it means for you.

Professor Ian Walmsley Provost

The Total Remuneration Package (TRP) is a new, more complete way of looking at the pay and benefits you receive as staff, both financial and non-financial. It represents an ambition to empower our staff with information on remuneration that is more accessible, more holistic and which allows for a more informed dialogue on what we provide.

There are many elements that form our TRP. Here are the highlights:

Salary Determined by the job family you’re part of and benchmarked against the London market and peer institutions

Leave Generous leave allowances – including family and special leave – to enable a proper work life balance

Equity and achievement What you receive is reviewed regularly to ensure it is fair and so that we can recognise exceptional achievement.

Wellbeing Resources, support and coaching to help you manage your mental and physical wellbeing

Benefits Includes loans, healthcare, financial support and access to tools and networks to encourage your development

Environment Building better ways of working and equipping you with what you need to succeed

Pensions Helping you save for the future with our two pension schemes: SAUL and USS

Perks Additional perks to help you save some money

Detailed information on each of these components is available at www.imperial.ac.uk/ human-resources/trp

Components of TRP Historically, we have tended to discuss topics such as pay, benefits and pensions in isolation from one another.

In fact, they are all components of an interconnected package.

Figure 1: Total remuneration package

Base pay

Reward and recognition

Benefits

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Basic salary

•

Additional allowances

•

Awards

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Pay relativity (equity and achievement)

•

Pension

•

Leave

•

Wellbeing

•

Environment

We set our own frameworks, salary scales and approach to pay and benefits, driven by markets and our ambition to compete with peer institutions. We don’t determine our contributions for pensions however – they are national schemes with the contribution structures collectively agreed. This local flexibility and holistic view of remuneration is distinctive to Imperial within the HE sector.

What do we spend on TRP?

We know that some individual components are more developed than others. It is therefore important that staff are equipped with a holistic understanding of what TRP entails, so that discussions on future changes can be held in a meaningful way.

Detailed summaries of each component is available at www.imperial.ac.uk/humanresources/trp

LEFT – Figure 2: Breakdown of spend on staff costs in 2019/20

£1.5M

Our goal is to maintain our position as a world-leading institution and our people are the cornerstone of this. This means we need a comprehensive TRP to attract, support and retain the best.

£66m

£49m

£451m

This requires significant investment. More than half of our annual spend goes towards our TRP, with staff costs in 2019/20 totalling £567m.

The remainder of our annual spend is used to fund what enables our people to do their work, including investments in equipment, buildings and infrastructure.

Staff Salaries

Pensions

Social Security

Restructuring costs

Taken together, both types of spending allow us to remain at the forefront of world-leading research and teaching.

How do we decide what we spend?

Figure 4: 2019/20 income vs. 2019/20 spend

TOTAL INCOME: £1,026m

The amount we spend on TRP is not unchangeable – on a long-term basis, we are able to rebalance our overall package to reflect the priorities of our staff. Each component, however, is interconnected: changes to one part will have a resultant impact on all parts.

There are two key factors that influence what we spend on our TRP: • Benchmarking against comparable institutions to ensure we’re competitive • Balancing this against our other commitments and income to ensure we’re sustainable

Figure 3: Staff spend vs core estate spend 600 500

502

483

567

537

400 300 200

210

187

179

139

100 0

2017/2018

2016/2017

Staff

Staff spend spend

2018/2019

2019/2020

Capital expenditure Capital expenditure

Flexibility The TRP is designed to allow a holistic understanding of what you receive as a member of staff, so that regular dialogue on changes can be held in a meaningful way. These are on an institutional level, rather than an individual one: through the regular review and consultation processes we run, we are able to realign the TRP to reflect long-term shifts in staff priorities.

1. Benchmarking If we want to attract, support and retain the best, we need to understand what our competitors are offering. This isn’t always straightforward: a TRP is comprised of multiple interrelated components – some financial and others non-financial – that are not all easily comparable. Different countries also have different environments and cultural expectations that result in varying priorities around remuneration.

We annually benchmark roles in all job families across the College against the London market and peer institutions.

Building upon this, in 2018, as part of the College’s first Pay and Benefits Review, staff asked that the pay benchmarks used to identify the rate of pay for academic staff include international comparator institutions. The Provost’s Board convened a working group, led

by Professor Nigel Brandon, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, to explore the matter. What was quickly identified by the working group is

that, unlike other professions, international benchmarks for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) for academics are not readily accessible.

This has meant that the process has taken longer than we had expected, which was further impacted by COVID. Nonetheless, we will be publishing our first international public benchmarking exercise in 2021, which will aim to compare the pay and benefits at Imperial with similar institutions in Europe and the USA. 2. Affordability Our people are at the core of what we do.

In building a TRP that is appropriate for our status as a world-leading institution, we need to make sure that our approach enables not just excellence, but excellence that is sustainable over a long-term period.

Tuition fees and education contracts (£338m) Research grants and contracts (£384m) Funding council grants (£154m)

Other income (£152m) Investment income, donations and endowments (£34m)

TOTAL SPEND: £1,099m

This means that we need to ensure what we spend on TRP is affordable within the income we generate and when balanced with the other commitments we have.

Over two thirds of our income comes from research grants, research contracts and tuition fees. Much of this funds the delivery of research or education. With what remains, we’re always trading off investments in different areas – salaries, building refurbishments, running costs etc. We can increase one for a bit – but if we underinvest in any one element for a long period, then the university suffers unless we can generate more income.

On average, we’ve invested around £180m per year on our estate over the past 4 years.

Keeping laboratories and teaching spaces at the forefront and fit for purpose requires a significant investment.

Staff costs (£567m) Bursaries and scholarships (£42m) Premises running costs (£65m)

Teaching and Research support non-staff – faculty/dept (£80m) Teaching and Research support non-staff – central (£62m)

Premises/other capital spend (£139m)

Research grants and contracts non-staff (directly charged) (£85m)

Interest/loan repayments (£29m)

Other non-staff (£30m)

A year in TRP 2021 The TRP we offer aims to be able to reflect the priorities of our staff.

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Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap Report

This is why we are in a constant process of conversation and review to ensure, wherever possible, individual parts align with what is expected.

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USS and SAUL pension valuations

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Publication of international benchmarking report

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Local pay bargaining

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Pay relativity

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Staff Forums

As the TRP is made up of a wide variety of components, there is no one singular forum to do this. Instead, across each year there are multiple processes designed to assess, review and modify various components of the package. Some of these processes happen annually, whilst some are instigated to react to short-term needs.

Here is a summary of some of the key developments within our TRP in 2021. It is not comprehensive – further information will be regularly provided through staff communications and on the website.

www.imperial.ac.uk/ human-resources/trp