The case for diversity and inclusion in the workplace is compelling not just because it is the right thing to do, but because numerous studies suggest it can drive better business performance too. An increasing number of territories are also introducing legislation that requires companies to publish diversity statistics, but how do you shift from a mindset of compliance to using these types of analysis as a catalyst to drive behavioural change?

Our guest on today's episode is Katy Gray, who looks after Reward at Arup and who has been at the forefront of gender pay gap reporting at the company. She is using these insights to help shift what was a data centric to a people centric exercise.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Katy and I discuss:

• The role of reward in a people focused organisation 

• The intricacies and challenges involved in gender pay gap reporting

• Examples of how the insights from gender pay gap reporting has helped drive behavioural change at Arup

• We also look into the crystal ball and ponder what the future of HR will be in 2025

This episode is a must listen for anyone in an HR leadership or people analytics role as well as HR and business professionals interested in how people data can drive business outcomes and support initiatives around gender and equal pay, as well as the wider diversity and inclusion area.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Gapsquare, to learn more visit www.gapsquare.com/accelerate.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I'm delighted to welcome Katy Gray, Reward Manager for Arup, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Katy it's great to have you. Thank you for being here.

Katy Gray: Thank you for having me.

David Green:  Could you give listeners a quick introduction to yourself and your role and also your unconventional route into HR?

Katy Gray: I'm the Reward Manager at Arup for UK, India, Middle East and Africa. So covering a few markets, I predominantly sit within the pay space within reward but we also look at benefits and other governance that comes in. In terms of my route into HR, it is probably a little, as you say, unconventional. So following university I studied law and then hit the financial crisis, that's a slight clue as to how old I am as well. Then I actually started in international aid and development. I think I've always been leaning towards people, and then having left the charity sector I actually just took a bit of a random job through a friend and ended up working as a tax consultant and then fell into the more exec comp reward work, share schemes, incentives, putting those in for enterprise organisations really as well as some of the financial reporting that came out at the time post the financial crisis. So then doing that I had a call about a role at another company in house and then moved from consulting into reward in house and that's the start of my reward career really.

David Green: It's interesting because we are noticing lots of people coming into HR from unconventional routes, and I think as HR becomes more analytical and more digital, maybe more focused on the end user i.e the employee or the worker, we are seeing a lot of different skills coming into this space, which is good.

In our prep call I really loved the way you described your vision of rewards and the important role it plays in a people focused organisation. It'd be great if you could share that.

Katy Gray: I remember a couple of years ago when I was consulting, we had some sort of training around being able to tell people what you do. I think rewards has been quite an unknown area. You know, you are at a party and you say, oh I work in HR and everyone has assumptions about what that means, but when you say, I work in reward, people say oh and what is that? I think I started out saying, it's a bit of a cross between finance and HR, but then I thought that doesn't really cut the mustard for what it is and then those people said oh, so you’re payroll? And I would think, well no not really.

So after a while of working and having a look at it for me, and this is the draw for reward, it's really about taking the strategy of the company, taking what they want to do, how they want to do it and then using that sort of psychological piece around how do you drive people to do that? Or how do you drive people away from other behaviours? So we often see with HR you get the simpler side of things or particular organisations that don't have the strength in it in the same way. I think reward can be the same, you can have quite typical comp and benefits, which can be just around running processes or the governance, but for me, reward is that step further. You're helping an organisation as well to think about future impacts and also then what has worked, what hasn't worked.

I've been fortunate to work for companies where they’ve not just jumped on the bandwagon of things or tried something new just for the sake of it, but they've really been thoughtful about what they're doing. So that all plays into it, and that piece around reward is very much being a bit higher level than just the pay itself. That's what keeps it interesting and rewarding and fun but gives it the variety. You can be working across all sorts of different projects and I think that helps with that.

Often in rewards you'll see that somebody wants to drive behaviour by maybe saying, how do we pay this sort of thing, whereas actually that’s often the wrong way round. You need to be looking at the principles of how you do something and then you overlay how to pay it. So, it does keep it varied and kind of have a finger in a few different pies here and there.

David Green:  Of course. You talked about reward being obviously very important to a company's strategy and executing that strategy for its people.

One area where there's a lot of focus at the moment is around the whole diversity and inclusion topic. You have responsibility for gender pay gap reporting at Arup amongst other activities. So as someone who actually does that work what actually is involved in gender pay gap reporting?

Katy Gray: First of all I think, again, that just depends on your company. For some organisations it's really just about reporting the numbers. It's about the calculations and then putting out the number in to the world through the regs. For us it's more than that. It's understanding all business, it’s understanding what's driving things. When we do the calculations have we got underneath the surface of what they really mean, what they're driving. EDI is becoming something that is being taken note of and I think it's important to see.

Gender pay really has, to some extent, I think driven some of that at a time when it was already beginning to emerge. I think it came off the back of the stats for having X amount of women at board level for FTSE 250s, but it was getting there, just not getting there fast enough. I think it is a crude tool, but it's definitely made organisations sit up and take notice.

Now I know there's some sectors and some areas that just want to report their numbers and that's all but certainly I've been provisioned work for companies where it's actually about understanding what's going on and doing something different, or actually looking at the crux of what it’s there to do, what it says to drive.

Gender pay is about changing something that's a bit of a societal issue, it’s big and it's huge and it is tricky. You can't fix years of history just in one reporting legislation.

David Green: No exactly and the World Economic Forum says it will take 202 years or something to close the gap, which is actually better than the last estimate which was 217 years, but it's still far too long. Clearly.

Katy Gray: Yes it is, especially when you think about the amount of generations that would take. So I'm not surprised we've seen some movement and people thinking we need to do something about this. It does interest me because equal pay obviously has been legislation that's been in for so long, it's been around before I've been around, so why suddenly have we got this change? It's obviously not doing what it was expected to do. It has driven some change in behaviour, but not to the extent that we wanted it to or quickly enough. So for me gender pay is wider than that and again, when you think about reward, it's not just about spitting out some numbers as governance, it's about understanding your organisation and how you're doing that for your people.

David Green: This will probably relate to some of what you've just said, but what are some of the challenges involved in collecting and analysing that data?

Katy Gray: I think for me working in any organisation data is always tricky, finding the data, where it's stored and which data you need. Gender pay seems like a very simple calculation when you look at it, it’s just an average and a mean and then a separate median, So you then have to underlie what actually is considered as pay in that scenario. So lots of organisations or people would think pay just means your contractual salary or your FTE amount, but you've got choice deductions that come into that, that take account of how people are choosing to use their money as well as then other little allowances or other amounts that you get paid and obviously the larger the organisation the more of those things you see. So making sure that you've also got the right eligible people included and what that looks like, that can be quite tricky. That's the main bulk of where we spend our time is making sure we've got the right people included in that calculation.

David Green: When we spoke last week, you talked about some of the things that you need to look out for. I think you mentioned levelling, for example. and there's a couple other things I think that you mentioned that you'd really need to look out for when you're doing this analysis.

Katy Gray: Yeah, I think gender pay you can have a number that looks great on the outside but perhaps if you don't understand where it comes from it can be covering things up. If you can delve under the surface of really understanding your people and understanding what's going on across the different parts of the organisation it gives you a much better idea of what that number really means. We all know the phrase about lies and statistics, so you can spin things but I think what I have seen and talking with colleagues in the industry, sometimes we might see if a company has a grading structure or a levelling structure, it might look at certain levels that it looks pretty good for women, or that pay might be in favour of women. But if you've not run the analytics you might not know that actually it could be that you're not progressing your women quick enough so they've been longer at that level. They've had more pay rises and therefore they are being paid at the top. That's where the calculation itself becomes a bit crude and trying to pull it up.

Certainly the more you do it, you realise why the government has said, 250 people because you can have one individual that can really shift the number quite dramatically. Which surprised me at the beginning I was quite shocked when you see one individual that might get a bonus for joining an organisation or it might be that they've had a particular payoff for something in that month, in April, in the key snapshot date, and it changes then what it looks like. So you need to also understand those anomalies to be able to say, actually, that's an anomaly rather than being able to say, that's the standard of what the organisation is doing as well.

What fascinates me now we're kind of moving on is there's things around those deductions and those choice deductions. I think we've seen some change around childcare vouchers as well and when you start to look at things like that, that's when you ask more questions. Is it just the women that are taking childcare vouchers versus men, or have you got an organisation where men are taking more childcare vouchers versus the women, and that would affect the pay balance as well as to what comes out in gender pay.

David Green: So it's slightly more complex than people think. I think it can be the prompt, it can start the business of asking other questions which may get to deeper problems and challenges that they want to solve. So Katy developing on one of the things that you've talked about already, how do you move away from just analysing gender pay gap for compliance and use it as a catalyst to drive change in behaviour?

Katy Gray: I think that's why it's really important to delve under the surface of gender pay, the more you know about what is driving behaviour, the more you can look at what you might want to think about moving or shifting in an organisation.

I think when gender pay first came out, a lot of people were quite confused as to the difference between gender pay and equal pay and I don't think a lot of the media reporting helped with that. I used to think, please don't do this to us anymore this is not helping our communication, because often the gender pay / equal pay would be intertwined, as a phrase. But I think once you get past that point, it is again, taking the understanding why is gender pay there? What's it there to do? What do you want to do as an organisation? And for me Arup is really about doing the right thing and it's about it's people and they're invested in their people and they're investing to change the world to be a better place.

So they want to know more about their number, what is driving that? So you have to start really getting under the surface of what are the things that you think might affect this and checking them out. Sometimes that leads you off into a million of different warrens, or you might go down a different path than you thought you would and then try to draw all that back. For me it was just having a conversation with a couple of my colleagues and asking what do we think might be affecting our number? Let's run some analysis on that, and that might spit something else out which makes you think, gosh, that's not what I was expecting.

I think the more you work with data you have a gut feel of where you think it's going to go well or for your organisation the longer you're there, the more you see similar trends and what's coming out. So you begin to take a warren and decide actually, this is what we want to go down, this is what we want to explore.

So we all know that there are potentially highlights that people want to look at around leave types, it might be a sabbatical around paid leave, or it could be maternity. I might start with something like that and then move into other things that we consider could be blockers or things that could hold people back within an organisation and that's both for men and for women. Unfortunately gender pay doesn't really allow in the same way for people who don't define as a gender because of the regulations but we still do quite a lot of reporting around not just the regulatory numbers, but actually for the organisation as opposed to just completing the tick box exercise.

I think the more you do that and the more you break things down, it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of energy, but that's where you need the analytics to come in and ask what does that mean and where does that take me? What's really pushing my gap number? Is there a particular lever? I think the more you look at gender pay, there are probably a number of different leavers that you can have a look at but overall the biggest one is representation. The question then is how do you shift the representation and what feeds into that? We could pull a couple of different leavers each year but it's not going to shift and change in the ways that we want to shift and change as an organisation and that's why we are coming out of some of those warrens and we do that in our team certainly and really get to the absolute bowels of what it means, but where’s it going to have a real effect and what is it going to really make a change. And that shift from trying to understand what gender pay gap means into how do we use this now to be a real KPI or a tool to help us look at what do we want to do.

David Green: Do you have any examples of that at Arup? Have you got any of the insights that initially came out from the gender pay gap reporting that has helped drive changes in behaviour at Arup because ultimately it's about changing behaviour, isn't it?

Katy Gray: I think it's really moved from in the beginning, in the first year of reporting, it really was about understanding the numbers and understanding what gender pay means and I think now we are in our third year of reporting, actually what we're looking at is where are we moving quickest in change in representation and where do we need to move more?

I think like a lot of organisations we've made some really good changes around attract, develop and retain. So thinking about what have we got going on in certain areas for example in attract, like a lot of other organisations as well, we've really looked at the ways we're bringing people into the organisation.

We've really changed how we write an application form or job description to help avoid some of the barriers that we classically knew might be there and actually it will take time to see some of those feeding in to the gender pay because it's a backwards looking number, but it means we are shifting and we are seeing that difference because we've made a change. Now some of that was already in place before gender pay came in. There were initiatives that were being looked at to be developed because as you say, with EDI it's not just about gender, but it's a wider piece of how you are bringing people into the organisation, what that diversity looks like.

So having gone from, oh my goodness what is gender pay? What's our number? What do we look like? As most organisations did quite number of years ago, it's moved into what does gender pay mean for us? And actually we want to be about people in the wider EDI. So is gender pay becoming a part of that and not being so focused on just gender pay but the wider EDI piece and gender fits into that.

David Green: Yes as pay is just one component. What is interesting around job descriptions is obviously the more data that we absorb and see the more you actually learn things. If we just look at gender for example there are classic ones that I've seen where if there are too many bullet points on a job description men will apply for a job apparently if they match about 60% of the bullets, whereas women would only tend to apply if they meet over 90%. So the more bullet points you have, probably the less women you're going to get apply, which seems like quite a simple insight but it just shows how behaviour is different.

Katy Gray: I think one of my favourites was an example from a company where they had used bots or automation for CV screening, but of course it's only as good as the people building it and the biases that sit behind them so what they found was the algorithms were just moving towards a more biased position and really showing what some of those underlying unconscious biases where that was sitting in there. That really is why with gender pay it is so important to know your organisation, but it still fits into that EDI, you can't change things if you can't change some of those underlying biases or help people to see that they have a bias. I think a lot of people are just very unaware of what that looks like or what it means and then how to address it in a way that is meaningful and isn't just a reactive piece of work.

David Green: Yes and I think again maybe doing the gender pay gap analysis helps prompt some of these questions further down the line. I want to switch direction slightly now continuing on the gender pay gap stuff, but understanding the technology that you're using to support your work around this and particularly not just doing the reporting but taking it that step further. So what's the role of technology in supporting your work?

Katy Gray: I think technology already has an important part to play and digitalisation is coming. I think it's something that can really help teams and individuals add value because it can take out some of the grunt work. So we use a tool called Gapsquare, it's a great online cloud tool, it's very simple, very easy to use, but has got some great analytics driven behind it and an already set within the tool. So for us as an organisation data is the thing that's really tricky to collate and look at and certainly for us trying to amalgamate everything into the same sort of data from different types of employees, so whether that's your overseas outbound international assignees, to some of your more casual staff and then your regular payroll employees, I think the hardest part was getting those together. But actually the first thing that we did with the tool then was to use some of that data we had calculated versus using how the tool calculates it and making sure that where we could those by those numbers match.

So it was a great audit and a great check. Whenever you count people numbers and governance and doing regulatory reporting is so important that you've got these audit checks and you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. That is really key for me, I'm a bit of a data geek.

I think that's where you begin to see a tool really helping you quickly identify whether there are things that aren’t matching yet and you can go back to those numbers. Similarly then the tool is so handy to just be able to really flip in analytics. Excel is brilliant, it's still got its place. I certainly don't think we're in a world yet where we're moving away from Excel as an analytical tool. It's capabilities go far beyond anything that I've seen enabled to do but Gapsquare certainly goes a long way for us. I think one of the quickest things is rather than having to build your own formulas in the background, which takes quite lot of time, because a lot of that's built into the tool there are some great things where you can switch things on and off to be able to see what your number looks like.

So whether you want to use maybe what does our FTE salary number look like versus the gender pay number. And that's a great calculation because actually it tells you that your FTE salaries may look one way, but perhaps there might be some allowances or other parts of the business where you're paying things because of whatever reason that might be, that might be affecting those numbers so again that's another check for us which is quite quick to then see what's going on.

The other great thing for me about this particular tool is I don't just have to use pay, so I can use other things. I can look just at my allowances or I can look perhaps at pension payments because, one of the things I’m starting to think about is, yes we're talking about pay here and now for an organisation but actually this is a bit of a societal issue and although organisations can't always change society we can start to highlight issues. If there's a pay gap then there's going to be a pension pay gap because actually your pension is driven by what you get paid. I think the stats are now looking at, and I've certainly seen some reporting around, what does that pension pay gap look like. This is something that is certainly very relevant for me because I'm being told my generation is not really going to have a pension by the time we get there unless we've done private pensions with companies.

So what does that mean also then in that wider reward perspective when you're looking at the new generations coming in who don't necessarily want to give to a pension but want the cash because they're looking at buying houses in a market where It's very difficult. So pension then becomes something that's draining your disposable income, and it's trying to balance all of that up as an organisation. It's then great to just use this tool to quickly chuck in all your data and merges it all into one that you can use and start to pick out these individual things in a way that's just far quicker than being able to put those formulas in an Excel.

David Green: Good, so technology helps and obviously you've mentioned that you're in the third year now of doing the gender pay gap analysis at Arup and what have been your key learnings so far in the first couple of years? What worked well and what didn’t? And what would you do differently or what are you doing differently based on the first two years?

Katy Gray: I think I alluded to that earlier on, when you first start you just chuck everything at this thing. What does it mean? What does our organisation look like? Again you push that out to the organisation and we really wanted to look at not just our organisation as a whole because that's the reporting, but have we got things in perhaps different business units that look a little bit different or might suggest that we're doing something differently across those units that will change the way we're approaching it. Obviously people are very different, so are there managerial things or behavioural things we're doing? So we broke it down quite a lot and we broke it down by our levelling and we broke it down by our areas and I think that was absolutely brilliant to do in the first year, and I'm not sure I would do it differently, but actually we are learning from it, moving and progressing towards what we want to see.

So three years in now what we're really looking at is our team still very much looks at the details. We still do that. What are our leavers? What do they look like? But rather than bombarding a business with every little change, what are the things that are really going to make a difference? I think pretty much for a lot of organisations from the reporting I'm reading as well as for ours it's about that representation piece, in particular the senior level. I think the gender pay gap has really supported some of the initiatives we've already had in so it has been a tool for us to look at, yeah actually in that attract space that's going really well, we’ve been able to get a nearly 50/ 50 split with our graduates in the last couple of years, which is just excellent in an engineering market. And that's been so uplifting for us because we know that pipeline is coming through. We want to celebrate those successes. I guess on the other side we know that we're not getting that same level of change at our senior levels, but that's very difficult in a market where there are less women, engineering is pretty tricky for that. So then it makes you think about, right, well if we are doing well there, how do we want to do other stages of people's careers and other specific things we then need to target and look at. And again, that just feeds into that whole, what analytics are you running?

But I think rather than having all of that data going out to your organisation, where perhaps as an expert I probably understand it a lot better than just your general Joe on the street. Actually being able to do real analytics and saying these are the important bits and these are the things that we need to focus on.

And again, that comes back to that vision for me about reward. What's the strategy of the company? What's the company about? What are the things that are going to probably sit well, some quick wins, let's be honest about that as well. But how do we move things to a place where we're focusing on the right things? That's quite a responsibility So that's where I say for us, we've got to know absolutely inside out what's going on and I think in those three years we've moved to some additional analytics. We've moved to some analytics where we think yes we're going to keep those exactly the same, but also then helping the business to see that, yes there might be 15 levers but if you pull these two, that's going to make a big difference.

David Green:  It helps you identify the most important levers, helps you understand these are some of the initiatives that we've done with these. These are the ones that were going well, these are the ones we need to focus on more and our analytics are telling us these are the levers that we need to pull to do better in these specific areas. So it's drilling down on that. I guess telling that story of course to the leaders, but also to the workforce as well within the business in a way that they can digest.

Katy Gray: You might say, well gosh, are you choosing for the organisation? You've got to do it in collaboration. You've got to do it in conversation. I think now people are beginning to understand gender pay it's easier to kind of pull out a bit more in that way. Whereas before, when people didn't understand necessarily what it was or the crudeness of the calculation or the complexity of it, you've got to be able to deliver that first to then call people out. I don't think you could just go straight in and say, well, it's fine we've done the background work don't worry about that, we know it's just this one lever. But I genuinely believe that representation, particularly at senior levels, I know for us, that's something we’re all definitely looking at and we need to move faster in, that to do that will shift the numbers a lot more dramatically than some of the other things we might look at and look around.

And of course, underlying all of this, although I say not to confuse gender pay with equal pay, you've always got to make sure you're looking at your equal pay as well.

David Green:  So when we were preparing for this discussion a couple of weeks ago, you said something that really stuck with me actually. You said that in your opinion the gender pay gap has moved from being a data centric discussion to one that is far more people centric. I think it'd be great if you could explain a little bit about that and also maybe an extension of that, clearly the people element but also how this can be linked towards business outcomes as well.

Katy Gray: I think when you start, and that's probably what I've been talking around, is you're very much looking at data and you're very much looking at what's the data doing? How is it moving, where's it going? Or are there things that you can do to change with the data.

But ultimately this is driven by people, what we do in HR and people teams is driven by people. I think there is a real move to looking at how we certainly take data but are not so focused on data and moving into what that means or how that then moves people into what they're doing. The thing I always say to my team when we start salary reviews, so it is something I do, its slightly separate to the gender pay, but I always say to them what you have to remember in organisations, everything we do there is an individual at the end of this, this is not just about a bunch of numbers or some assets. People are always your biggest and most costly asset but they are still people. They're looking at their value, they're emotive. They want to know what does this number mean for me? And that's where you have to take that data approach, but make sure you're still making it human and still helping people to understand what that means for them sat next to somebody of the opposite gender, particularly in gender pay, at their desk. Our gender pay gap number doesn't mean that if I'm doing a job and the person sat next to me is a man doing that same job, that they are paid differently to me but what it means is there are things within the organisation or the choices that we are making as individuals, as in employees or in our cases, members, because we're a member owned organisation that affects our pay. But also making sure that each individual understands what does gender pay mean for Arup. What does it mean we're doing as an organisation and for us, I know the government reporting is moving to having narrative and what we're seeing is that they are really requesting that, actually I think it’s part of the legislation, you've got to start having this narrative. That for me seeing that coming through legislation that yes you've got to do your data, you’ve got to know your organisation through data. You can't escape that. But making sure you're then realising that there are people that sit behind this. Every type of technology, everything we use, everything that we are moving into that digital focus it's still about the end user. You know, there's things that we need absolutely as a team and HR needs to be able to look into and do and for that system to work in.

I think about digital technology around us at home as well. You've got to think about the end user and how it works and how easy it is to understand, so it's about communication. It's about what you're putting out to the business, It's how you're putting it out and how you're describing things. That does become very important and with gender pay I think we've seen that. That’s moved from here's a load of data and what it kind of means, and people asking questions, why have we got that? Why is that not changing too? Actually having probably a bit more narrative and a bit more about what it looks like. If you look at our gender pay gap online at the moment, arup.com, we have the stats that are all there, all of the numbers that we need to report of course, but then we talk about under this attract, develop and retain. What are we doing? What are we doing for our people, and what is it that those people need? And I think we start to see in organisations that there are different needs across the different generations and the different groupings of people, however you want to look at them, what they're requesting and what they need looks different, and how do we then start to respond to that.

David Green: Great. Communication is so important and I think it's great that you're going that step further and actually putting the story out there as well and the actions that you're taking in each of those areas.

Katy it's been a great conversation. We've now come to the question that we ask all our guests on the show, and actually its only five years away, so what do you think the role of the HR function will be in 2025?

Katy Gray:  I know it's terrifying, isn't it? In five years its 2025.

I think we are certainly in a time where HR or people teams as we now kind of use as a phrase as well, are moving towards that data driven people focus. I think there is no longer the ability to sit on the fence around digital. I get my phone out for everything whether I’m traveling, whether I’m doing the regular weekly shop on the train on the way to work, I can access so much through digital technology. The same with our systems and our reporting, the better we're starting to look at things like analytics and the more we're having these tools that make that easier I think as HR professionals we've got to start thinking about what that means.

What do those analytics do? How are they driving what we do as a business? And we've got to start taking them seriously. I think there's been quite a shift with all the governance that we're seeing in HR to a lot more of the large consulting firms taking on some of that sort of people HR role, I know particularly with gender pay lots of organisations do give that out to large consulting organisations. I think we've got to start bringing some of that back in house as well and making sure that we are at the forefront of what's going on and we are understanding what that means for people and being quite quantitative as well as qualitative about what we're doing.

I think we need to embrace change. I think it will be coming, it's coming, it's already here in some places and it really needs to help us be agile in how we are working. Thinking about doing things maybe a bit differently but we've always got to keep people at the centre of what we're doing.

So I think digital is there it's going to change what we're doing, but I think we have to underline it with data and analytics and that for me is why I think that gender pay is really great because it's about people and that for us is our organisation, but it has to be supported with what's going on, what we are seeing, what are the trends.

We've got to be able to be a bit more analytical, it’s already moved from that kind of gatekeeping, Oh HR says no I can't do that, and supporting employees to more of driving the business, driving strategy. What's the purpose of what we're delivering? What does the business purpose look like, and how do we sit at those senior levels to help drive those organisations into thinking more about their people?

You can't run an organisation without people and unless you're an organisation that’s just computers, but you still need people. And it's still only so far robotics go at the moment in terms of how intelligent they can be. People are our biggest asset let's get the most out of them, but not in the kind of, lets drive them in to the ground and get every bit of blood out that stone, but actually how can we work smarter and more efficiently, and how do we use data and digital technology to move into that area so that as people teams we're adding value we're not just delivering what needs to be delivered, but we're adding that additional value. We are advisors and consultants within our own organisations, and we have that space to really be able to do that. I think you've got to show to an organisation how you can do that and really show to them this is how we're adding value to you and your people. If we can get really the most out of people then we can keep, we can retain and we can help people move on and come back. Because there are lots of shifts now. We'll get more out of them. The happier people are, the more productive people are, the more productive they are, the better for the business numbers as well.

We see that with gender pay and diversity, the more diverse an organisation is the better their productivity, the better their bottom numbers are.

David Green: Katy thank you very much for being a guest on the show. How can people stay in touch with you?

Katy Gray: I'm on LinkedIn, Katy Gray, or please feel free to email me at work as well, katygray@arup.com

David Green:  Perfect. Katy, thank you very much for being a guest on the show.