ABOUT SHETLAND ISLANDS COUNCIL
Shetland Islands Council is the local authority for the Shetland Islands, established in 1975, that serves 22,000 people. With two large harbours including one of Europe’s largest ports, the Sullom Voe Terminal, operated by the council, and 14 smaller ports, the council employs numerous different maritime positions.
OVERVIEW
The Shetland Islands Council wished to collate salary and benefit information
from the UK’s leading Ports, Terminals, Towage and Engineering Service providers to ensure that the conditions they offer are in line with the market and their competitors.
Shetlands Islands Council went out to competitive tender for the provision of benchmarking services. We designed a solution and submitted our tender response in line the RFP requirements and were awarded the contract.
UNDERSTANDING THEIR NEEDS
Shetland Islands Council required a marine specialist recruitment agency to partner with that could conduct a full benchmarking survey for them. This survey was to cover 17 different roles and provide data on the basic salary, allowances, benefits, pay rise, bonus, working conditions and employee care for each role with each participating organisation.
Navis Consulting was able to leverage our relationships across the maritime sector to engage nine different organisations to participate and provide their data for this benchmarking survey. This meant a dataset covering over 1,000 data points.
As the terms and conditions reported on varied greatly and were in both quantitative and qualitative format, we provided the reporting in multiple formats including bar and line graphs to represent quantitative data, and in-depth written analysis of the various markets and positions to report on qualitative data.
IDENTIFYING THE CHALLENGES
The challenges we faced were:
Time
It would take companies time to collate employment terms for each position
Competitors
Participating companies would need to be incentivised to take part as their information will be going to a competitor
Variety of data
Salaries and benefits will depend on different factors
SHETLAND ISLANDS COUNCIL'S AIM
Shetland Islands Council’s aims for the benchmarking report were:
A clear report, easy to understand and action
To see comparable salary and benefits data
A varied and relevant data pool
To determine if they are competitive in their market
OUR BESPOKE STAFFING SOLUTION
Given the strong relationships we have with many companies on the list of desired Ports, Towage and Engineering Service providers, the Account Management team had a list of relevant Line Manager and HR employees’ contact details from each organisation, all contained within our CRM System.
We proposed a solution that offered potential participants the chance to receive an anonymised, light version of the report for their own benefit as a gesture of goodwill for participating. Coupled with our existing strong relationships with target organisations, we were able to generate immediate interest in participating in the exercise and gain greater engagement from the participants.
We created survey documents that we sent out to each participating organisation to gather the data and then verified this information with them individually on receipt of their completed surveys.
We then analysed the data, generated graphs and wrote reports on the findings. This was a lengthy process, gathering the right level of information from each participant and then analysing the data to create an insightful report.
DELIVERING ADDITIONAL VALUE
In addition to completing the benchmarking survey for Shetland Islands Council:
We demonstrated the benefit of a well-executed benchmarking process, which enabled them to ensure they retained their existing staff and helped them secure new staff
We went on to provide a further 6 benchmarking surveys for them over the following years for different skillsets
We provided soft cost savings by preventing the Council from having to repeat tender for these services as they knew they could trust us to deliver
even if they are in the future.
