Ben Haddad· Compensation Consultant, Tidewater Utilities
Posted in Job Architecture & Careers ·
I have now worked on job architecture at four employers, most recently a telecoms group in Spain and Portugal with about 8,000 people, and each time the same thing happened. The design started with a sensible number of levels and the middle of the professional track ended up with two more than anyone could tell apart.
The usual cause is a promotion problem being solved with structure. People want to move every two years, the work does not change that often, so a level is inserted. Panels then spend hours arguing over distinctions nobody can describe.
My test: if two experienced managers cannot, without notes, say what differs between adjacent levels, one of them should not exist. We removed two of our twelve last year. I expect disagreement.
7 helpful · 6 insightful · 1 agree · 5 replies · 115 views · 2 following
Elif AlvarezCRP
Director, Total Rewards, Kestrel Aerospace
You'll get it from me. Fewer levels means wider pay ranges, and wide ranges are where pay gaps hide. When we went from eleven levels to eight at a Danish manufacturer, range spread went from 40% to about 65%, and our gender pay analysis within level got worse for two years, because position in range was now doing the work the level used to do.
Compensation Manager, Silverline Media
Agree with the diagnosis, less sure about the cure. The demand for movement every two years is real, particularly early in a career. We kept the levels but stopped pretending each was a different job: levels 2 to 4 are explicitly one job at three stages of proficiency, with lighter criteria and no panel. Panels only meet from level 5 upwards.
VP, Total Rewards, Meridian Health Systems
How did you handle the people in the two levels you removed? That is the part that stops most of us. Merging upwards costs money and merging downwards costs trust.
Global Mobility Manager, Kestrel Aerospace
We merged upwards in both cases, about 610 people, and held their pay where it was within the new, wider range. Cost in the first year was close to nil. The real cost comes later, since they now have more headroom.
On the pay gap point, that is fair, and we added quarterly monitoring of range position by gender because of it.
HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
Your two-managers test is a good one and I have used a version of it. We gave 20 managers anonymised role summaries and asked them to place each at a level. Agreement was above 80% everywhere except between levels 6 and 7, where it was 48%. That one result did more to justify a merger than any design argument.
