Strong Job Architecture provides a company and its employees with a clear framework to understand roles, align jobs and set pay according to the type of work being carried out. In defining a company’s roles, it also serves as a basis for making strategic decisions around pay, retention, career progression and skills development. Here we look at how Job Evaluation and our Evaluate tool lays the foundation for this. Next time, we’ll take things a step further by exploring our new Pathfinder tool, set to launch later this year.
Any company can benefit from a Job Architecture framework, but it can be particularly valuable in larger companies. The process of grouping roles together by level or function flags where workers are performing roles and activities of a similar level and shows where they sit in the company’s broader value chain and hierarchy.
The recent trend has been to move away from hierarchical approaches to a more flexible and agile way of working, often adopting the concept of job families, but in practice every company will be slightly different.
What are job families?
Using Job families allows HR and business leaders the added agility of grouping or separating out roles, either internally or against the market. For example, in-demand IT roles might belong in a ‘technical’ job family, whose pay might be inflated in response to a tight market or skills shortage. By separating this group out, any market premium adjustments to their salaries can be made in isolation, without the need to inflate all pay ranges for head office roles, even if deemed to be at a similar level.
A job families-led architecture can also enable a pay strategy based on required talent and business-critical roles. For example, using job families a company may choose to pay business-critical commercial roles with premium skills at upper quartile in the market to retain and attract strong talent, while paying below the market median for other operational roles that are less critical or easier to replace.
Nailing the numbers: the importance of Job Evaluation
One key challenge in Job Architecture is settling on the right number of levels. Grade hierarchies are often put in place to enable progression but can also become too rigid and drive status cultures. If there are too many levels, employees can also struggle to understand the difference between them.
At Innecto we developed our bespoke Job Evaluation tool Evaluate based on work level theory, where every level has a clear description of the value a role brings. Having a good job evaluation methodology supports the distinction between levels but requires more than a simple grade descriptor of 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C if it is to mean anything to workers.
The same challenge applies to job families. You can overcomplicate things by creating too many and giving each a different approach to pay. HR and marketing roles may have different skills sets, but their pay is typically quite aligned in the market.
A new focus on skills
Considering market pressures and the technology transformation we are seeing with AI, Job Architecture is now starting to evolve to become more focused on skills. Instead of focusing on job titles, let’s group skills and focus on them as enablers of progression. Because skills are more tangible, employees can feel more empowered by recognising the skills they need to perform their current job, and the upskilling needed to meet the demands of a prospective job.
Rather than sitting and waiting for their careers to be moved on through earned progression, employees recognise their ‘career’ as something they can control, with skills learned along the way. The core principle behind this approach to career development is that it enables both vertical and lateral movement and supports talent retention by experiencing and using skills in new ways.
The ultimate Job Evaluation tool: Evaluate >>
If you are finding job levelling or job evaluation slow, cumbersome or resource-heavy, using Evaluate can deliver multiple benefits:
- Evaluates roles quickly and easily, reducing the onus on HR resource
- Increases confidence that roles are being assessed fairly and consistently
- The built-in job description library allows HR to create, save and edit job descriptions and the simple structure enables easy identification of where they sit within the hierarchy of a levelling framework
- Evaluate can model scenarios and allow for proactive planning during periods of change or growth, providing clarity around requirements for organisational design.
Looking ahead: we explore Pathfinder, our new tech tool launching later this year. Pathfinder will enable employees to take ownership of their careers through a clear, interactive and self-directed experience, visualising potential pathways, skill gaps, and development opportunities in real time.
To find out more about Job Evaluation, or to book an Evaluate demo, please contact justine.woolf@innecto.com
