Tag: job evaluation

BUILDING YOUR SALARY SCALE: THE JOB STRUCTURE

Written by Kai Donesa on . Posted in Resources.

An organization’s job structure is an illustration of its how specific jobs are grouped and classified based on the nature and purpose of work, different levels of contribution, and how each level relates and progresses to one another. More importantly, the job structure provides the framework to which organizations can apply policies on compensation management, as well as design strategies around learning and development, specifically on career opportunities and promotion, all aligning to the company’s overall business objectives.

There are different types of job structures available, each one designed to support specific needs an organization might have. When choosing which type of job structure to adapt, the focus of your existing jobs – whether career-based or project-based, any future expansion, and the possible addition of new roles or teams within your organization – should be kept in mind.

The most common types of job structures are the traditional salary structure, the broad-banded structure, and the project-based structure, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Types of Job Structures

  • Traditional job structure – provides a well-defined sequence or progression path from one job level to the next. Think of a typical career progression: Entry-level roles start as analysts, then progress to specialists, while MBA graduates (for example) start as specialists, then progress to managers, and finally to directors. The differences in levels of contribution, complexity, and pay ranges are explicit at each level, and movement within the grade or to the next higher-grade can be deliberate based on skills growth and experience. Traditional job structures are easier to manage and communicate to staff, but the pay ranges often have less flexibility than other approaches, particularly when staff reaches the maximum point of their job grade. Traditional structures are found most often in organizations with well-established career paths, where staff grow their careers by moving “up the ladder.”
Traditional Job Structure
  • Broad-banded structure – A broad-banded structure comprises fewer bands with multiple job levels grouped into each one. Some organizations prefer the broad bands because they provide wider pay ranges and more flexibility in pay management. As staff accumulate more skills and experience, pay increases and progression can be provided through lateral movement within each band without necessitating a promotion. Broad bands are not without their own challenges, however: They often cause confusion for managers and staff since less structure and guidance are provided for salary setting and the differences between job levels within each band are not as distinct as a traditional structure. Broad-banded structures are more popular with organizations that desire a flatter hierarchy and fewer levels.
Broad-banded job structure
  • Project-based Structure – The project-based structure also has grades or bands similar to the first two structure types above. What makes this structure different is that each grade or band is designed for roles that have short lifespans to reflect the project timing, without the possibility of promotion. A structure like this is only appropriate for project-based organizations with definite term contracts. Project-based structures often have higher minimums reflecting the need for employers to reach experienced talent that can “hit the ground running.” Employers utilizing such a structure should also consider project completion bonuses to improve retention.
project-based job structure

In Birches Group, we believe that a simple, clear, and consistent approach to job evaluation is the key to a well-designed job structure. The type of structure and number of grades an organization chooses to go with is an easy one to adapt, but without a solid job evaluation methodology to readily provide the standard needed to classify your jobs into their appropriate levels, will only lead to bigger issues in capacity and pay management in the future.

Our Community™ Jobs solution uses only three factors – Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery – to evaluate any job across fourteen grade levels. These three factors are found in any job and together, provides a simple and transparent methodology that serves as the foundation for an exceptional job structure.

Organizations require structure to optimize and ensure the capacity it needs to achieve its goals and ultimately lead to business growth. Job structure, along with the pay structure, are one of the most important human resources management tools an organization will need to build and maintain an organized and efficient workforce. Through our integrated workforce management solution, Community™, Birches Group is ready to help your organization create a job structure that fits your needs. Contact us to learn more.

Want to know if your existing compensation practices have the elements of a good compensation program or if there are areas that could use some improvement? Take our quick Compensation Program Assessment Quiz to know your score!

Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.

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IT STARTS WITH JOBS

Written by Bianca Valencia on . Posted in Resources.

The Birches Group solution for job evaluation is Community™ Jobs.  In a prior article, we explained a bit more about our integrated approach to HR management through the Community™ platform.  In this article, we will delve more deeply into how organizations establish their internal structure, and how to measure it.

Community™ Jobs is intuitive.  It segments the workforce into groupings of jobs that are clearly distinguishable from one another in a progressive manner, zeroing in on the placement of jobs step by step.

The How and The Why

The first step is to determine into which of two categories a job falls:

The How and The Why

This division of an organization can be traced back to the military.  The Roman Army was the first large organization where roles were arrayed according to rank: the enlisted (“How” jobs) and officers (“Why” jobs). These military structures have been adapted by private and government institutions over time, and while they certainly have evolved a lot since Roman times, the fundamentals are still the same.

The two categories are complementary:

  • Why jobs focus on managing and leading the organization, and the origination and delivery of policies, products, and programs.
  • How jobs focus on executing processes and transactions, including quality control, under predetermined guidelines.

Let’s take a closer look.

The Community of Work – The Four Job Clusters

Within the categories of How and Why, we have identified two clusters of related jobs within each group, as shown in the diagram below:

Job levels found within each of the job clusters defined above possess similar characteristics based on their purpose and contribution toward the organization’s mission.

Fourteen Job Levels

Once jobs have been classified into their appropriate clusters, using the three job evaluation factors of Community™ – Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery – it becomes possible to finally evaluate jobs, level by level, into Birches Group’s fourteen Community™ job levels.

Beginning with physical or manual roles at BG-1 under the General cluster, all the way to organizational leadership at BG-14 in the Leadership cluster, the fourteen Community™ job levels can easily be adapted and used to determine equivalent worth amongst jobs in any organization.  The table below shows the values for each factor by level.

When an organization’s jobs have been aligned to the fourteen Community™ job levels, a foundation is established to easily ensure internal equity, measure market competitiveness on pay, assess skill level among staff and manage performance evaluation, using the integrated Community system™.

To learn more about Community™ and how it can support your organization, contact us.

Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.

JUST THREE THINGS: HOW PURPOSE, ENGAGEMENT, & DELIVERY CAN BE USED TO UNDERSTAND YOUR ORGANIZATION AND SUPPORT YOUR HR PROGRAMS

Written by Bianca Valencia on . Posted in Resources.

In our work with hundreds of organizations, many apply long-standing, well-accepted approaches for the management of human resources. The HR function is steeped in traditional methods and so-called best practices for everything from job evaluation and compensation management to performance management. At Birches Group, we believe for organizations to innovate and thrive, they must be willing to try new things. Our Community™ Jobs approach provides a fresh perspective on one of the most misunderstood areas of human resources – job design and evaluation. Good job design and clear job evaluation are critical to fully support all other programs in HR.

How Community™ Jobs is Different

Job evaluation is traditionally a highly technical area of HR, reserved for the “job evaluation high priests” to compile results and share with the organization. Usually, job evaluation systems are complex and hard to understand, using many different factors to determine results.

Birches Group built Community™ Jobs to be simple and transparent, and easily understood by HR, managers and yes, even staff.  We also believe that job evaluation forms the fundamental underpinning of everything HR does – from compensation and recruitment to development and performance.  Every area of HR is impacted by job evaluation and job levels.

Just Three Things

Community™ uses three factors to assess work: Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery, across fourteen job levels, as shown in the diagram below:

The primary factor is Purpose, which answers the most critical question: why does this job exist in the organization? Purpose enables us to examine each role within the organization and determine its primary objectives and how it supports the overall mission of the organization.

The second factor of Community™ Jobs is Engagement, identifying how each job interacts and collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to carry out its function.

Delivery, the third factor of Community™ Jobs, examines how each role plans, organizes and delivers work to fulfill the organization’s mission. It focuses on how a job manages tasks, transactions, services, projects, or programs under its purview.

The three Community™ factors taken together allow us to understand how an organization conducts business across all levels of work, starting with defining the purpose of its jobs, determining their level of engagement, and examining how each of its roles organizes and delivers service.

The Six Indicators

For each of the three job evaluation factors, we have identified two indicators to connect the job directly to the skills and knowledge required for success:

Each of these indicators is used in applying the Community™ Jobs evaluation methodology.  But importantly, the same criteria are also used to develop standards in the other modules of Community™.  Community™ Skills allows organizations to measure experience explicitly by evaluating an employee’s accumulation of skills and knowledge over time.  Community™ Performance provides a standard for measuring achievement by considering how employees have performed against the standard established for their job level.

Job Evaluation in Action

What are some examples of how job evaluation results (job grades or levels) can be used in other areas of human resources?  Here are just a few:

  • Job descriptions.  One of the most unstructured and tedious task managers face is writing job descriptions.  And most of the time, they are just a listing of tasks and inputs.  Birches Group believes job descriptions should be purpose-driven, output-focused and written from the perspective of what the job must deliver.  Our approach for job description writing uses the job evaluation factors and indicators as a basis to describe duties and responsibilities.  Best of all, no job description will ever exceed one page!
  • Salary bench-marking.  We use Community™ Jobs as the job evaluation methodology when conducting our salary surveys in over 150 countries.  Every employer’s jobs are matched to a Birches Group level, enabling a consistent and fair comparison to jobs in the market with similar levels of contribution to the organization.
  • Salary management.  Organizations use job grades to build salary structures, which in turn provide managers with tools to optimize the organization’s competitive position and ensure high levels of employee engagement.
  • Skills assessment.  Managers will often say that employees with more experience should be paid more. But there is no standard for measuring experience other than time, until now.  Using the Birches Group Community™ job levels, we have developed explicit measures for each job evaluation indicator, arrayed over five separate skill levels.  This skills assessment tool can be used for multiple purposes, including pay management, learning and development planning, succession planning, promotion readiness, and ensuring unbiased application of starting salaries, to name a few.
  • Performance management.  The same three factors used for job evaluation – purpose, engagement, and delivery – can be used to measure achievement.  For example:

Purpose – Does the employee have good ideas?

Engagement – Did they listen and adapt to customer feedback?

Delivery – Did they deliver on time with high levels of quality?

Community™ Performance has a structured approach to measuring achievement by linking back to the job evaluation factors.

By focusing on the Community™ Jobs factors — Purpose, Engagement, and Delivery — managing all areas of HR is now possible using a simple, consistent, and integrated approach.

Bianca manages our Marketing Team in Manila. She crafts messaging around Community™ concepts and develops promotional campaigns answering why Community™ should be each organization’s preferred solution, focusing on its simplicity and integrated approach. She has held various roles within Birches Group since 2009, starting as a Compensation Analyst and worked her way to Compensation Team Lead, and Training Program Services Manager. In addition to her current role in marketing and communications, she represents Birches Group in international HR conferences with private sector audiences.