Anonymous member· Global Mobility Manager, Vantage Telecom
Asked in Pay Equity & Transparency ·
We are a Dutch software company with around 900 employees and eight grades. Grade 5 alone contains senior engineers, account executives, a finance business partner and our office managers' team lead. On paper they scored the same in the job evaluation three years ago.
If I use grade as the category, the gap in grade 5 is 9.4% and almost all of it is engineers against everyone else. If I split by job family within grade, most cells have fewer than 15 people and the comparison stops meaning much.
Is anyone using grade alone, and if you split further, how did you justify the split as something other than a way to make the number smaller?
6 helpful · 4 insightful · 5 replies · 247 views · 2 following
Accepted answer· by Petra Dubois
We landed in the middle. The category is the grade. Within it we report the gap, then show how much is accounted for by a short list of pre-agreed factors: job family market reference, location and time in grade. Nothing gets added to that list after we have seen the numbers. The discipline that matters is the order. We wrote down the factors and the evidence for each before running anything. For engineering that meant three years of survey medians showing a 12 to 15% premium. On small cells: we do not split to get there. The grade stays whole and the factors do the explaining.
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Total Rewards Manager, Steinbach Industrie
We use grade alone, 11 grades for 2,200 people in Belgium and the Netherlands, and we accept that some categories show a gap we then have to explain with objective factors. Market premium for engineering is one of those factors, documented with survey data per role. I would rather explain a visible gap than defend a grouping that looks engineered.
Wren ZhangCRP, CEP
Job Architecture Lead, Silverline Media
If the evaluation says those jobs are of equal value, then splitting them apart afterwards is saying you do not believe your own evaluation. That may well be true, in which case re-evaluate. Ours was a decade old and when we rescored 60 benchmark roles, a third moved a grade.
HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
Accepted answer
We landed in the middle. The category is the grade. Within it we report the gap, then show how much is accounted for by a short list of pre-agreed factors: job family market reference, location and time in grade. Nothing gets added to that list after we have seen the numbers.
The discipline that matters is the order. We wrote down the factors and the evidence for each before running anything. For engineering that meant three years of survey medians showing a 12 to 15% premium.
On small cells: we do not split to get there. The grade stays whole and the factors do the explaining.
Rosa BauerWWP, GRS
Head of Reward, Pinehurst Foods
One caveat on the market premium argument. It worked for us for engineers, but we were challenged on why the premium roles were 78% male and whether the market itself was the problem. We did not have a good answer beyond showing we hire against the same range regardless of who the candidate is. Have that evidence ready.
Director, Total Rewards, Halcyon Financial Group
This is very useful. I am going to keep grade as the category and write the factor list before the next run, with the survey evidence attached. I suspect we also need to rescore a sample of grade 5, because the office team lead sitting next to a senior engineer has never felt right to anyone.
