How can employers’ reward and CSR strategies contribute to the UK’s levelling up agenda?

‘Levelling up’ has proved hard to define, but in broad terms it is about reducing inequalities between areas, through increasing productivity and improving living standards.

It’s also about restoring a sense of community and local pride. It might also mean addressing inequalities on other dimensions, such as the gendered imbalances observed in the roles and experiences of men and women. Research funded by the Nuffield Foundation reveals interesting insights on these themes.

There are big regional differences in employment and wages across the UK. Evidence from the IFS Deaton Review shows that average wages in London in 2019 were £20 an hour compared to £13 in Scarborough.

Much of this difference is due to the concentration of high-skilled workers in a few parts of the country, something that individual employers can do little about. But ‘good work’ should be available wherever people live and can contribute to levelling up across many dimensions.

For example, research by Global Research for Women’s Leadership highlights the value that parents place on job quality. Flexible working, job security and support from managers are all important factors for working parents.

There is evidence that mothers in particular sometimes sacrifice important elements of job quality, such as pay and progression, to secure others, particularly flexibility. This means many get ‘stuck’ in flexible roles with little opportunity to ‘level up’.

In this context, barriers to good work include gendered assumptions that devalue part-time employment and limit training and progression opportunities, and managers with poor knowledge of flexible working arrangements.

Employers can also play a role in enabling staff to contribute to their communities. Research undertaken during the first year of the pandemic reveals that the benefits of volunteering are even greater than we might have anticipated.

The ‘Beyond Us and Them’ project found that volunteering had significant personal and community-level benefits, including deeper, more sustainable psychological resilience in a time of crisis.

The research also shows that volunteering can contribute to more resilient local places, as volunteers reported higher levels of trust in local and national government, a greater sense of neighbourliness, and more optimism for the future than non-volunteers.

Taken together, these results point to the potential difference that employer reward and CSR strategies can make to people’s lives and the well-being of the communities in which they are based.

While it is undoubtedly the case that some levelling up will require central government investment and infrastructure, smaller scale changes can also make an important difference.

Alex Beer is welfare programme head at the Nuffield Foundation