Not why, but how: Forsman & Bodenfors’ mission to bring pay equity to our industry

This is something of a redemption story, and something of a call to arms. We (specifically Toby) got rather heated recently in response to a Campaign talking heads story, where a group of agency leaders were invited to comment on gender pay issues. The reason for the heat was pretty simple – we at Forsman & Bodenfors chose to address the challenge head-on. We want others – every agency in our orbit – to do the same. So we decided to open up the discussion, and invite anyone who wanted to join us into a discussion about our journey.  

Just before Cannes, we hosted an intimate forum in our London office where a few agencies who had voiced their interest joined us to hear our story. 

Chatham House rules. Unvarnished and real. Next week, we’re running another session for a bunch of agency folks who couldn’t make round 1. We have an active dialogue now with a cohort of people, representing a wide range of businesses from independent and domestic to public and global, engaged in the dialogue. For the first time, people showed an interest in HOW we got here, rather than why. And we're grateful to have the chance to share our story.  

In summer of 2022 and after a near five-year journey, Forsman & Bodenfors became the first global creative agency to achieve Fair Pay Workplace Certification. An independent, third-party auditor, Fair Pay Workplace, backed by Syndio  assessed our pay practices, policies, and communication – open-book access. The agency was awarded ‘Fair Pay Workplace Certification across our collective as a result, including confirmation of gender pay equity in every office. Media interest from the US to Singapore to India were interested in our story - how we did it, and what took the industry so long.  

Twelve months later, we retained the certification and today, we continue to have gender pay equity. We are aiming to do so again in 2024 – the assessment is currently underway, and now involves 80 or so new colleagues across our new Dublin and London offices. We reassess every 12 months and monitor constantly. This takes effort, decision making, transparency, time and – yes – money. We need to ensure we spot disparities (better, avoid them) and correct them in order to maintain the certification.  

But to return to the beginning...we started the journey not because we thought it was a good idea or a ‘nice to have’ or a compelling part of our response next time the Campaign School Reports come round or respond to a client’s RFI about DE&I policies!. We started the journey because our people told us it was important to them. And because our people are central to our strategy.  

We build our whole collective around a very simple plan that exists – and we use these words in every internal meeting - “for the benefit of our people, our work, and our clients”. That is a hierarchy. Just about the only one we have at Forsman & Bodenfors. And of course it’s also an interconnected, self-fulfilling cycle. Unhappy people, bad work, disgruntled clients. No people, no work, no clients.  

For exactly this reason, we run an annual study across the agency to understand how people are feeling about life at work, helping us understand to a good depth what people need, what we can do to support their growth and development, and where we’re falling short. And we heard very clearly that pay – specifically transparency over pay – was something people thought about a lot. And when you’re thinking about something a lot, it can become a distraction and a worry. One of our jobs as leaders is to remove those obstacles. So we set out to do that, and to relieve any anxiety around pay.  

It was an uncomfortable process, but essentially a simple one. In fundamental terms, there were just three steps: audit where we are today; assess any gaps; close the gaps. The audit covered salaries across every role in the agency, in every office, and gave us a complete overview of salary data in the business. The assessment allowed us to look across functions, levels within functions, and highlighted gaps – those gaps were exposing. Closing them cost money.  

We learned a lot along the way that people running agencies might know and feel intuitively, but the exercise itself allowed us to explore and better understand the nuances of pay equity across Forsman & Bodenfors. Starting salaries are the biggest determinant of pay equity inside organisations. In our peer workshop, everyone – from agency to HR consultant to L&D business – had experienced gender discrimination of one kind or another here. One direct benefit of our commitment to maintaining pay equity certification insures us against this happening at Forsman & Bodenfors: we publish salary ranges for every open role; we do not ask for salary history in our hiring practices. We can do this with confidence, now we know where our people sit in the agency and that similar work is compensated similarly.  

The ancillary benefits – of the journey itself, of achieving certification, and of the commitment to retaining it – are enormous. One example is that the audit stage uncovered 104 different job titles in an agency of 400 people. 25 of those were in one function. Some of those titles had, unquestionably, been invented or awarded as a proxy for addressing pay equity issues - “we can’t stretch to a salary jump right now, but we are promoting you to assistant associate creative services manager – YAY". Another is the learning that we had, as we grew globally outside of Sweden, failed to properly share our core principles and ways of working together in teams. Less about pay, more about culture. But the audit helped expose these issues and get us on the path to resolution.  

So the conversation has begun, the interest is there (that’s a relief), and we have committed to sharing and supporting anyone interested in learning more. We will do this at least quarterly for as long as there’s engagement. We hope other leaders make the commitment to pay equity, and we will celebrate when they do. It's a process that represents real progress for an industry that’s great at talking about change, but too often finds itself making excuses for not actually changing. Like many things, the hardest part is taking the first leap, making the decision to be transparent. We’re here for anyone who wants to get started. 

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Grace Hart is head of people operations and Toby Southgate is global CEO at agency Forsman & Bodenfors