Nina Vargas· Global Mobility Manager, Steinbach Industrie
Posted in Job Architecture & Careers ·
A cautionary tale from a software and services company in India, about 3,900 employees in Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. Leadership wanted something visible for employees quickly, so we published career paths for all 17 families in the same quarter that we were still finalising the levels underneath them.
Over the following eight months we changed the level structure twice, merging two levels and adding a specialist track. Each change invalidated the published paths. We reissued them three times, and by the third version the open rate on the announcement was 11%.
If I did it again I would publish levels and criteria first, let one full promotion cycle run, and only then publish paths. Slower, but people would have believed them. Has anyone managed to do both at once?
6 helpful · 3 agree · 3 replies · 178 views · 3 following
Samir DelaneyCBS, CEP
Senior Compensation Analyst, Silverline Media
We did both at once at a Brazilian fintech of about 1,100, and got away with it only because we published paths for three families as a declared pilot and said plainly that they would change. The other eleven families waited ten months. A pilot label buys a lot of forgiveness that a company-wide launch does not.
Global Mobility Manager, Kestrel Aerospace
I would go further than one promotion cycle. The first cycle after a new framework is always odd: a backlog of cases, managers testing the boundaries. We waited two cycles at a Singapore shipping company, and the paths we then published reflected moves people had actually made, with numbers, instead of moves we hoped they would make.
Benefits Manager, Silverline Media
A different angle: the paths were probably too detailed to survive any change. Ours are deliberately loose. Each family has a single page showing levels, typical moves in and out, and three example journeys from real employees. When we merged two levels last year, updating all 14 pages took an afternoon.
