Levelling 1,900 store roles when 80% of them sit in just three levels

Most of what is written about job architecture assumes a professional workforce. I work for a grocery retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium with about 21,000 employees, and 80% of our store population sits in three levels: assistant, senior assistant and team leader. The collective agreement defines the first two.

Our consultants proposed the same ten-level structure for stores and head office. We tested it and store managers could not use it; the bottom levels were split so finely that it made no sense on the shop floor.

We ended up with one framework of ten levels on paper, but stores use only five, with criteria rewritten in terms of what you are trusted to do unsupervised: open the store, handle cash discrepancies, run a shift. I'd like to compare notes with others in frontline-heavy organisations.