Iron Mountain – gender pay gap report 2022 - 2023

Iron Mountain is a global business dedicated to storing, protecting and managing, information and assets.

Iron Mountain has two UK employing entities, Iron Mountain (UK) PLC and Iron Mountain (UK) Services Limited which are required to report their gender pay gaps. The table below shows the make-up of each employing entity:

At Iron Mountain, we foster a culture of collaboration, courage and customer obsession that all Iron Mountain employees live by. We work together to create a workplace where employees’ authentic selves are welcomed, accepted, and included. When we fuel innovation through diverse ideas, backgrounds and perspectives, our people thrive, our customers benefit, and our business succeeds.

What we did in 2022/2023

Women@IM, is one of the Company’s global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) continues to grow. The purpose of the group was re-evaluated during 2019, and with that came a new Vision and Mission. The group is composed of both men and women, who want to make a difference and the membership continues to grow.

During 2023 Women@IM held several well attended Global Professional Development on-line events, which included subject areas such as Presentation Skills, Using Emotional Intelligence to Build Relationships and Your Career, Using Setbacks to Build Resilience and Succeed, and Activating Your Network.

There is a dedicated internal social media page for the Women@IM resource group. Senior role opportunities are highlighted on this platform, and podcast/articles are shared on a regular basis. There is also content on Mental Health support initiatives, health campaigns impacting women predominantly (e.g. Breast Cancer Awarenss) and how to manage childcare challenges.

A quarterly newsletter generated by Women@IM was recently launched, “IM Talkback”. As part of this publication, there is a spotlight on females in senior roles, who share their career journey, and also provide some inspirational guidance for other women.

International women’s day

International Women’s day was embraced throughout Iron Mountain in 2023, and was seen as an opportunity to drive positive change. There were many posts of our employees showing support on how they will embrace equity on both our internal and external social media platforms, led by the Company’s President and CEO.

A global event was arranged open to all employees on IMWD, to attend a professional development session on “Inclusive, Everyday Leadership”, which was facilitated by a female-led organization, whose mission is to help companies retain and advance valuable female talent by making their female employees feel supported and empowered at every stage of their life and career.

Within the UK a panel discussion was held which consisted of 3 key female women who were asked questions around their thoughts on women in sales and in tech roles and why we were so under-represented, and the barriers they faced in the workplace as females. They were also asked to provide the audience with career advancement advice.

Charity support

Iron Mountain are currently partnering with a charity “Smalls for All”, a charity based in Scotland founded as a result of problems poverty stricken women and children have with accessing underwear in the UK and beyond. Iron Mountain also regularly provides volunteers to help out at the charities’ headquarters, supplying storage materials, and remain active in our support.

Looking Aahead

2023 will see the launch of a new multi-faceted Women in Leadership initiative for our female Director+ population. This initiative will accelerate the attraction, engagement, retention and readiness of women leaders for promotion by cultivating the skills and behaviors needed for advancement within Iron Mountain.

In Iron Mountain, globally, our aim is to continue our mission to have past, current and future employees view their experiences at Iron Mountain as an accomplishment and source of pride we intend that:

• We will relentlessly strive to be a world-class employer in every region in which we operate.
• By 2025 we will tighten our threshold for gender pay parity from +/-10% to achieve +/- 5% across all organizational levels in all countries where we are reporting (US, Canada, UK)
• By 2025, women will represent 40% of global leadership

Pay and bonus gap data

The gender pay gap shows the difference in average hourly pay and annual bonus pay between women and men at Iron Mountain. It is different to equal pay, which looks at pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value. The gender pay gap shows the differences in the average pay between men and women regardless of role.

Our most recent Gender Pay Gap shows improvements on our previous year in all areas of pay and bonus, however we are not complacent with these results as the pay gaps show we still have a way to go before we close our Gender Pay Gaps. We are particularly pleased with significant improvements to the gender pay and bonus gaps in our QRS entities with 6% reductions in both average and median pay gaps and circa 20% decreases in the bonus gap. This is likely attributable to the hiring of a senior female Finance Executive which has added to our current group of female leaders based in the UK. The decreases in the gap here has helped us to see an overall decrease in our pay and bonus gaps at the combined QRS and TRS level.

This year we do need to highlight some changes to our pay and bonuses in our UK business which are having an impact on our pay and bonuses, particularly within the TRS organisation. After Covid and as part of efforts to help with the unique challenges the increased demand for drivers and warehouse staff, we took a look at frontline pay, from our frontline record handlers and drivers up to our supervisor population. We decided to retire our frontline quarterly bonus which affected circa 750 employees to enable us to roll these bonuses into frontline pay. This guaranteed the payment for this employee group, but also allowed them to be able to invest more in flexible benefits and contribute more to their pensions (as well as receive large contribution payments from the company). In our Gender pay gap there is now a noticeable drop in the number of employees receiving bonuses and in particular fewer women than men received a bonus. New joiners from August would not have received any bonus payments, however quite a few received the final quarters’ payments so we expect the number of bonus payments in the TRS organisation to drop next year. We also re-aligned supervisor pay by harmonising our bonus targets within the supervisor population and paying any additional amount a supervisor received above the set target into base pay. This may have inflated our median gender pay gap this year as a large proportion of this population are male.

We are pleased to report that when combined – our overall Gender Pay Gap falls significantly below the average of 15.4% and the fact our average Gender Pay Gap has decreased in both business entities suggests our strategy to empower and promote more women within the organisation is working. We are always continuing to look at ways to make our business a more diverse and inclusive place to work and encouraging equal opportunity to all employees. We try not to look at the pay gaps in isolation, as they are not the only measure of inclusion, although they are a good measure of highlighting areas for focus. We are not complacent about the challenges and we do still have areas of imbalance to focus on over the course of the next year, which we intend to resolve.