Elif AlvarezCRP
Director, Total Rewards, Kestrel Aerospace
Petra Dubois· HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
Asked in Job Architecture & Careers ·
Levelling 340 acquired staff onto our nine levels: before or after pay harmonisation?
We're a UK-headquartered industrial software company, about 2,100 people, and in March we completed the purchase of a 340-person business in Poland and the Czech Republic. They have five broad bands and titles that were handed out fairly freely; we have nine levels across two tracks.
Integration leadership wants everyone on our levels by January. Finance wants pay harmonisation deferred for at least a year. My worry is that if we level first, we will publish a level for each person that their pay visibly does not match, and about a quarter of them would sit below our range minimum.
Has anyone levelled first and lived with the mismatch? Or did you hold the levelling until there was money to back it?
3 helpful · 3 insightful · 4 replies · 181 views · 4 following
Accepted answer· by Oscar Lindqvist
What settled it for us was splitting the below-minimum group from everything else. Level everyone on the job, on the January date. For people under the range minimum, agree with finance a two-step catch-up with dates written down, and tell those individuals the dates. For everyone else, harmonisation can genuinely wait. Finance objected far less to a costed number for 80-odd people than to an open-ended 'harmonisation'. Also check how many of the below-minimum cases are really over-titled; about a third of ours were a level lower once we looked at the work properly.
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