Menopause Action Plan Template UK

Before you open the document

A menopause action plan is a public document. It is published on the government gender pay gap service, and it stays there. The people most likely to read it closely are your own employees, a claimant’s solicitor, and journalists covering your sector.

Government guidance sets out 18 suggested actions across five categories. The minimum is two selected actions: at least one on the gender pay gap and at least one on menopause. The guidance itself runs as six steps in a deliberate order. The first is to understand the issues in your organisation, engaging employees and using workforce data, before you select actions.

The template

Section	What belongs in it
1. Statement of intent	Three or four sentences. What the organisation is committing to and why. Signed by a named director, not by "the leadership team". A name means somebody is accountable for the review date.
2. Scope	Which legal entity or entities this covers, employee headcount, the reporting period, and the sites or business units included. If you are publishing for one entity in a group, say so plainly.
3. What we found	The evidence base. How you gathered it, when, how many people responded, and what it showed. Report the response rate, not just the responses. This is the section that carries the whole document, and it is the one most published plans leave nearly empty.
4. Risk assessment summary	The findings from your menopause risk assessment, by work area. Environmental factors, facilities, work organisation, uniform and equipment. What controls already existed and whether there is evidence anyone is using them.
5. Actions	The actions selected, minimum two. For each one: what it is, who owns it, the target date and the cost band. Add which of the five categories it sits in, and how many of your own employees asked for it. That last field is what turns a list into a case.
6. Actions considered and not taken	Optional, and the section that most improves how the document reads. What you looked at, and why you decided against it or deferred it. An employer who says "we costed on-site cooling for the packing hall at £48,000 and have scheduled it for the 2028 capital cycle" is visibly doing the work. Silence reads as never having looked.
7. How we will measure whether it worked	The baseline figures you will remeasure against, and when. Name the metric. "We will monitor" is not a metric.
8. Governance and review	Who owns the plan, which committee it reports into, how often it is reviewed, and the date of the next review.
9. How employees can raise something	The route, and what happens when someone uses it. Include what happens if the answer is no, because that is the part employees are actually assessing.

Choosing the two actions

Most published plans select the two cheapest actions available: a policy and an awareness session. Both are legitimate. Neither is evidence of anything, because both can be completed without ever finding out what your workforce needs.

A stronger pair looks like one environmental or operational change that came out of the risk assessment, plus one structural change to how adjustments are requested and granted. The first shows you looked at the work. The second shows you looked at the process that fails people quietly.

Rank by demand, not by ease

Say 41 of your employees asked for flexible start times and 6 asked for an awareness session. If you pick the awareness session, that choice is now published and permanent. Ranking actions by how many of your own people asked for them is the single change that most improves how a plan reads, and it costs nothing.

What section 3 looks like when it is done properly

Section 3 is where a plan is won or lost, so here is the difference in practice. Both versions below are the whole of an employer’s evidence section.

The version that gets published most often

No number responded, no response rate, no finding, nothing that could be measured again next year. It says an activity happened. It does not say what was learned.

The version that holds up

The second version is four sentences longer and does five things the first cannot. It names who collected it and when, so the independence is on the record. It reports the response rate, so the reader can judge the weight. It ranks requests by how many people asked, so the actions that follow are visibly connected to demand. It surfaces the barrier, which is a different problem from the requests and needs a different fix. And it gives a figure for existing provision, which is the number a board will ask about first.

Who signs it, and who actually reads it

Name a director. A plan signed by a function is a plan with no owner, and the review date will pass without anyone noticing. The name also signals internally that this was looked at above HR, which changes how seriously the actions get treated.

On readership, assume four audiences and write for all of them.

Who	What they are looking for
Your own employees	Whether the plan reflects anything they recognise. A plan that lists actions nobody asked for confirms that nobody asked them.
Candidates	A quick read on whether this is a serious employer. These documents are public and searchable by company name.
A claimant’s solicitor	What you knew and when. A dated baseline and a dated action list is a much better answer than a policy with no evidence behind it.
Journalists and sector bodies	Outliers. The thinnest plan in a sector gets written about, and the comparison is trivial to make because every plan is in the same place.

Five ways these plans go wrong

No named owner. A plan owned by a function is a plan nobody reviews.
An evidence section built from an internal survey with a 9% response rate, presented without the response rate.
Actions with no dates, or dates that have already passed by the time the document is published.
A metric that cannot be measured, so the next plan repeats the first one unchanged.
Copying a competitor’s published plan. They are all public, which means the similarity is visible to anyone who looks, including a tribunal.

The template is the easy part

You now have the whole structure, and it will take an afternoon to fill in eight of the nine sections. Section 3 is the one that will take longer than everything else combined, because it cannot be written from the inside.

Internal surveys about menopause underreport, and not because employees lie. Disclosing a health issue to the organisation that decides your promotion is a career calculation, and most people decline to make it. The same is true of the follow-up question that matters most: if you did not ask for an adjustment, what stopped you. Nobody is going to answer that on a form with their employer’s logo on it.

Summ Signal collects that evidence. We are not the employer, we sell your employees nothing, and we take no commission from any provider we measure. That is why we can report honestly when the support you already fund is not reaching the people who need it. It is self-serve: one flat price, set up in minutes, with results that unlock at 10 responses. The evidence paragraph is written from your own numbers and drops straight into section 3.