Quentin Kowalski· Head of Reward, Calibre Software
Posted in Job Architecture & Careers ·
A lesson from our rollout that I wish I had read a year earlier. We are a UK retailer, about 14,000 employees, and went live with new levels and career frameworks last spring. Every people manager, 1,150 of them, attended a one-hour briefing and received a 30-page guide.
Three months later we surveyed managers. 38% could not say what distinguished two adjacent levels in their own team, and HR business partners were fielding around 90 queries a week, mostly 'what do I tell someone who thinks they are a level higher'.
What turned it round was fortnightly drop-in clinics of 45 minutes, by function, where managers brought a real case. Attendance was voluntary and ran at about 30%. Query volume halved within two months. What has worked for others after launch?
5 helpful · 1 insightful · 1 agree · 5 replies · 297 views · 4 following
Benefits Analyst, Silverline Media
Similar experience at a US hospital system. Briefings told managers what the framework was; nobody had rehearsed the conversation.
We wrote six short scripts for the hard ones, including 'you were mapped lower than you expected' and 'your title is changing but your pay is not', and had managers practise in threes. Unglamorous, but the scripts are still the most downloaded item on our site.
Sales Compensation Manager, Pinehurst Foods
Voluntary clinics at 30% attendance means 70% of your managers are still guessing, and probably the ones who most need it. We made a 20-minute case exercise mandatory before a manager could submit a promotion nomination. Completion went to 96% because it was tied to something they wanted.
HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
I'd be careful about tying it to nominations. We tried a gate like that in a software company of 2,000 and managers treated it as a compliance click-through; scores were perfect and understanding was not. The clinics, where someone has to explain a real case out loud, taught them more.
HR Business Partner, Steinbach Industrie
Small thing that helped us: a one-page comparison for each pair of adjacent levels, written as 'the difference you would notice in a week of work'. Managers ignored the full criteria but used those pages constantly. We have 8 levels, so only 7 pages per track.
Nina VargasGRS
Global Mobility Manager, Steinbach Industrie
The adjacent-level pages are a good idea and I'm going to borrow it. On mandatory versus voluntary, we have settled in the middle: clinics stay voluntary, but any manager with an appeal lodged from their team is asked to attend the next one.
